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Herbig Ae/Be stars -- young, intermediate-mass stars which are still surrounded
by a disk -- are natural laboratories to study the formation of planets. In this
talk I present the results of spatially-resolved infrared spectroscopy of warm
molecular hydrogen and carbon-monoxide in disks around a sample of nearby southern
Herbig Ae/Be's. Qualitative differences are found in the excitation properties of
sources with strongly-flaring and self-shadowed disks, and are used to provide
further support for the hypothesis that strongly flaring disks have gaps --
possibly sculpted by the formation of planets -- and may present an evolutionary
successor to the Herbig stars with self-shadowed disks.
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