PF-04-0048

Dust asymmetry in the misaligned inner disk of the Herbig Ae star HD 100453 with VLTI/MATISSE

Luna van Haastere, Michiel Hogerheijde, Jozsef Varga

The relatively unprobed inner regions of planet-forming disks hold invaluable information to better understand planet formation.  We explore these (few) AU-sized regions of the Herbig Ae star HD 100453 with the Very Large Telescope Interferometer MATISSE instrument, which provides the unique capability to resolve these regions at mid-infrared wavelengths (3 - 13 micron).  At these wavelengths, we are able to spatially probe the thermal emission of small dust grains which form the seeds of planet formation. The inner part of the transition disk around HD 100453 has been observed before with the VLTI PIONIER and GRAVITY instruments, which detected a significant (symmetric) misalignment in the inner disk morphology compared to structures seen on larger scales. Our new observations with MATISSE see a similar misalignment but also detect a new asymmetric dust feature in the 3 to 4 micron range. In this poster I present these observations and propose models explaining the feature.