The physical processes leading to the disappearance of disks around young stars are not well understood. A subclass of transitional disks, the so-called cold disks with large inner dust holes, provides a crucial laboratory for studying disk dissipation processes. IRS 48 has a 30 AU radius hole previously measured from dust continuum imaging at 18.7 μm. Using new optical spectra, we determine that IRS 48 is a pre-main-sequence A0 star. In order to characterize this disk's gas distribution, we obtained AO-assisted Very Large Telescope CRIRES high-resolution ( R ∼ 100,000) spectra of the CO fundamental rovibrational band at 4.7 μm. All CO emission, including that from isotopologues and vibrationally excited molecules, is off-source and peaks at 30 AU. The gas is thermally excited to a rotational temperature of 260 K and is also strongly UV pumped, showing a vibrational excitation temperature of ∼5000 K. We model the kinematics and excitation of the gas and posit that the CO emission arises from the dust hole wall. Prior imaging of UV-excited polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon molecules, usually a gas tracer, within the hole makes the large CO hole even more unexpected.
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Brown et al. (2011) studied this question.