SIMBAD references

Recent coronagraphic imaging of the AB Aurigae disk has revealed a region of low polarized scattered light suggestive of perturbations from a planet at a radius of ∼100 AU. We model this darkened region using our fully non-plane-parallel radiative-transfer code combined with a simple hydrostatic equilibrium approximation to self-consistently solve for the structure of the disk surface as seen in scattered light. By comparing the observations to our models, we find that the observations are consistent with the absence of a planet, with an upper limit of 1 M_J.