TWHydraBand7 SS12 Overview
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Summer School Tutorial Overview
This is a temporary copy of the TW Hydra Band 7 CASA guide for use in the hands-on portion of the 13th Synthesis Imaging Summer School. In this tutorial, you will reduce science verification observations of TW Hydra. The morning will be focused on calibration and the afternoon will be focused on imaging. This page gives an introduction to the target and scientific motivation for the observations.
Science Target Overview
TW Hya is a pre-main sequence classical T Tauri star at a distance of about 52+/-1 pc (Mamajek 2005,2010). It is the most studied member of the TW Hydra association (TWA) of low mass stars. From a wide variety of previous observations from the infrared to submillimeter, TW Hya is known to have a hot inner disk extending to radii < 4 AU, which is optically thin in the IR, and a larger cold dust disk out to about 200 AU (see for example the introduction by Vacca & Sandell 2011, and references therein). Recent optical interferometry finds that TW Hya also contains a hot optically thick disk on even smaller size scales of ~0.5 AU, and suggests that the optically thin disk could be due to gas clearing by a planet (Akeson et al. 2011). TW Hya is apparently still accreting from its disk at a rate of about (4-20) x 10-10 Msun/year and the most recent estimates of its spectral type, mass, and age are M2.5V, 0.4 Msun, and 3 Myr (Vacca & Sandell 2011).
Millimeter and submillimeter observations of the continuum and spectral lines are particularly useful for tracing in the outer cold disk. Previous observations by the VLA at 7 mm (Wilner et al. 2000), ATCA at 3 mm (Wilner et al. 2003), and the SMA at 1.3, 0.87, and 0.45 mm (Qi et al. 2004, 2006, 2008 and Hughes et al. 2011) reveal Keplerian rotation in the disk and an inclination angle of about 7 degrees (i.e. almost face-on). Detailed studies of the dust continuum properties from the SMA work suggest that there are centimeter sized particles within the cold proto-planetary disk.
ALMA Data Overview
ALMA Science Verification data at Band 7 (~345 GHz) was taken for TW Hya on April 22, 2011. A scheduling block about 1.5 hours long was run three times in a row for a total of about 4.5 hours of observing time. The names of the three ASDMs were: uid://A002/X1d9d21/X3c1, uid://A002/X1d9d21/X5d8 and uid://A002/X1d9d21/X7df.
In order to ensure that you can work through the whole reduction in one morning, we focus the calibration guide on the first data set, "X3c1" for short. We provide all three data sets for imaging.
Nine antennas were available during these runs, but one has to be flagged. All four available basebands were used, resulting in four spectral windows (spws) containing data. Two basebands were placed in the Lower Sideband (LSB) and two basebands in the Upper Sideband (USB). In the LSB the CO(3-2) line at a rest frequency of 345.79599 GHz is located in spw=2. In the USB the HCO+(4-3) line at a rest frequency of 356.7342 GHz is located in spw=0. The other two spectral windows do not contain strong spectral lines and are used for continuum. Each spectral window is 0.5 GHz wide and the channel width is 122 kHz. Because the ALMA correlator was configured to apply Hanning smoothing of the signal, the effective spectral resolution is about twice the channel width, which in this case is about 0.2 km/s. For the antenna configuration in use at the time, the angular resolution is expected to be about 1.5". The median value of precipitable water vapor (PWV) for this period was 1.16 mm, as measured by the water vapor radiometers. This PWV corresponds to an opacity of 0.20 at the CO(3-2) line. The mean wind speed was 6.2 m/s.
The ALMA CO(3-2) data presented here is similar to the Submillimeter Array data presented in Hughes et al. 2011 (ApJ, 727, 85), though the SMA data have ~3 times smaller channel width at 50 kHz.
HCO+(4-3) data has not previously been published, but SMA HCO+(3-2) data (at 267.55762 GHz) is presented in Qi et al. 2008 (ApJ, 681, 1396). These SMA data have comparable angular resolution but a wider 203 kHz channel width.
ALMA HCO+(4-3) moment maps from TW Hya, with white continuum contours at 3 and 100 sigma. From left to right: integrated intensity, intensity weighted velocity field, intensity weighted velocity dispersion are shown.
Obtaining the Data
We have provided the data for you on the tutorial computers. The calibration and imaging portions of the guide will step you through how to get started.
Once you return to your home institution, you may want to follow the full version of the CASA guide. In this case the data are available via the ALMA science portal here .
TWHya Data Reduction Tutorial
The tutorial has two main parts. We will spend the morning on calibration of the data and then the afternoon imaging the calibrated data (and using these images to further refine the calibration). There is a separate page for each part of the tutorial:
- TWHydraBand7_SS12 this page steps you through the morning calibration tutorial.
- TwHydraBand7_Imaging_SS12 this page steps you through the afternoon imaging and self-calibration tutorial.
How to Use A casaguide
For tips on using CASA and ways CASA can be run, see EVLA_Spectral_Line_Calibration_IRC+10216#How_to_Use_This_casaguide page.
To learn how to extract executable Python scripts from the tutorial, see Extracting_scripts_from_these_tutorials.
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