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TITLE:

            The near-IR SED bump as a signature of a dusty halo around the inner disk regions

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AUTHORS:
Dejan Vinkovic, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
Zeljko Ivezic, University of Washington
Tomislav Jurkic, University of Zagreb, Croatia
Moshe Elitzur, University of Kentucky
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ABSTRACT:

 
We revisit the ``puffed-up inner disk rim" model by Dullemond, Dominik & Natta (2001), that was designed to explain the strong near-IR bump in the SEDs of Herbig Ae/Be stars. We find that their approximate radiative transfer solution significantly overestimates the flux - the exact solutions obtained by the code DUSTY demonstrate that this model does not provide a viable explanation for the near-IR bump. The errors in the approximate solution also affect the interpretation of the near-IR interferometric results.

We demonstrate that an alternative model, consisting of a disk embedded in dusty halo, provides good fits to the observed SEDs of Herbig Ae/Be stars. Furthermore, this model also explains a puzzling relationship between the luminosity and the interferometric inner radius of the disk, recently discussed by Monnier and Millan-Gabet (2002).
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