¹ Department of Physics, Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, MI 48859
² Department of Physics and Astronomy, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, N6A 3K7, Canada
³ Naval Research Laboratory, Remote Sensing Division, Code 7215, 4555 Overlook Ave. SW, Washington, DC 20375
⁴ Interferometrics, Inc., 13454 Sunrise Valley Drive, Suite 240, Herndon, VA 20171
⁵ US Naval Observatory, Flagstaff Station, 10391 W. Naval Observatory Rd., Flagstaff, AZ, 86001-8521

We present a numerical model describing a circularly symmetric gaseous disk around the Be star χ Ophiuchi. The model is constrained by long-baseline interferometric observations that are sensitive to the Hα Balmer line emission from the disk. For the first time our interferometric observations spatially resolve the inner region of the circumstellar disk around χ Ophiuchi and we use these results to place a constraint on the physical extent of the Hα-emitting region. We demonstrate how this in turn results in very specific constraints on the parameters that describe the variation of the gas density as a function of radial distance from the central star.

Accepted by ApJ
Preprints on the web at
http://arxiv.org/abs/0807.3971