A millimeter Continuum Size–Luminosity Relationship for Protoplanetary Disks

By A. Tripathi, S. Andrews, T. Birnstiel, D. Wilner. 2017

154 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a survey at subarcsecond resolution of the 340 GHz dust continuum emission from 50 nearby protoplanetary disks, based on new and archival observations with the Submillimeter Array. The observed visibility data were modeled with a simple prescription for the radial surface brightness profile. The results were used to extract intuitive, empirical estimates of the emission “size” for each disk, , defined as the radius that encircles a fixed fraction of the total continuum luminosity, . We find a significant correlation between the sizes and luminosities, such that , providing a confirmation and quantitative characterization of a putative trend that was noted previously. This correlation suggests that these disks have roughly the same average surface brightness interior to their given effective radius, ∼0.2 Jy arcsec−2 (or 8 K in brightness temperature). The same trend remains, but the 0.2 dex of dispersion perpendicular to this relation essentially disappears, when we account for the irradiation environment of each disk with a crude approximation of the dust temperatures based on the stellar host luminosities. We consider two (not mutually exclusive) explanations for the origin of this size–luminosity relationship. Simple models of the growth and migration of disk solids can account for the observed trend for a reasonable range of initial conditions, but only on timescales that are much shorter than the nominal ages present in the sample. An alternative scenario invokes optically thick emission concentrated on unresolved scales, with filling factors of a few tens of percent, which is perhaps a manifestation of localized particle traps.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/06ac33116cf32ef9922fbf9ab56b31d26ad11771

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

One Solution to the Mass Budget Problem for Planet Formation: Optically Thick Disks with Dust Scattering (2019, methodology): “Dust Disk Size - Luminosity Relationship Recent surveys (Tripathi et al. 2017; Andrews et al. 2018a) confirm the previous hinted linear relationship (Andrews et al. 2010) between the submm continuum luminosity and its emitting surface area.”
On the diversity and statistical properties of protostellar discs (2018, methodology): “In Lupus, Tazzari et al. (2017) give the number of systems that they are unable to determine disc radii for, but there is no indication of completeness in the studies of Andrews et al. (2009, 2010) and Tripathi et al. (2017).”
ALMA Survey of Lupus Protoplanetary Disks. II. Gas Disk Radii (2018, background): “However, the decrease in αmm for higher-mass disks may also simply reflect larger optically thick regions, which would serve to artificially decrease αmm and thus mimic grain growth (e.g., Tripathi et al. 2017; van Terwisga et al., in prep).”
Gaps and Rings in an ALMA Survey of Disks in the Taurus Star-forming Region (2018, methodology): “We might see a desert of gaps located outside 40 au for less massive disks, which seems to be consistent with the Lmm–Reff relation that fainter disks tend to be smaller in sizes (Tazzari et al. 2017; Tripathi et al. 2017).”
The Disk Substructures at High Angular Resolution Project (DSHARP). II. Characteristics of Annular Substructures (2018, background): “…indices and emis- sion sizes have explored whether disks only appear to be optically thin at low resolution because of beam dilution of optically thick substructures (e.g., Ricci et al. 2010; Tripathi et al. 2017), motivating an analysis of whether the DSHARP substructures are optically thick.”
The Disk Substructures at High Angular Resolution Project (DSHARP). I. Motivation, Sample, Calibration, and Overview (2018, background): “The bias in favor of targets with brighter continuum emission also translates into a preferential selection of larger disks, given the observed size-luminosity correlation (Tripathi et al. 2017; Tazzari et al. 2017; Andrews et al. 2018).”
Why do protoplanetary disks appear not massive enough to form the known exoplanet population? (2018, background): “It has been shown that Article number, page 3 of 8 some dust mass can be confined into optically thick inner regions of disks (Tripathi et al. 2017; Ansdell et al. 2018) and that the opacity of disks and their temperature is still debatable (e.g., Andrews et al. 2013; Pascucci et al. 2016).”