AAO Colloquium.

Thursday, 27th July - 3:30pm AAO Conference Room

Spectro-Astrometric Observations of Pre-Main-Sequence Binaries,
Outflows, and Circumstellar Discs

Hiro Takami

University of Hertfordshire

Recent experiments with spectro-astrometric observations of pre-main-sequence (PMS) stars have shown that this technique can be used to discover binary systems and disc gaps, and to study the kinematics of outflows on spatial scales down to a few milli-arcsec. Spectro-astrometry requires long slit spectra taken with a small spatial pixel scale, and these spectra are analyzed by profile fitting in the spatial direction to give the position of the source at each wavelength. The technique detects any structure which is not perfectly symmetric about the source, and a large number of photons provide a positional accuracy of much less than the seeing size or the diffraction limit of the telescope. I will present our results of new PMS binary systems, H-alpha and forbidden line outflow towards RU Lupi, and a gap in its circumstellar disc comparable to the size of the Jovian orbit.