TRANSITIONAL DISKS AS SIGNPOSTS OF YOUNG, MULTIPLANET SYSTEMS

By S. Dodson-Robinson, C. Salyk. 2011

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Although there has yet been no undisputed discovery of a still-forming planet embedded in a gaseous protoplanetary disk, the cleared inner holes of transitional disks may be signposts of young planets. Here, we show that the subset of accreting transitional disks with wide, optically thin inner holes of 15 AU or more can only be sculpted by multiple planets orbiting inside each hole. Multiplanet systems provide two key ingredients for explaining the origins of transitional disks. First, multiple planets can clear wide inner holes where single planets open only narrow gaps. Second, the confined, non-axisymmetric accretion flows produced by multiple planets provide a way for an arbitrary amount of mass transfer to occur through an apparently optically thin hole without overproducing infrared excess flux. Rather than assuming that the gas and dust in the hole are evenly and axisymmetrically distributed, one can construct an inner hole with apparently optically thin infrared fluxes by covering a macroscopic fraction of the hole's surface area with locally optically thick tidal tails. We also establish that other clearing mechanisms, such as photoevaporation, cannot explain our subset of accreting transitional disks with wide holes. Transitional disks are therefore high-value targets for observational searches for young planetary systems.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Spectroscopy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b2635c8f5e3754cf99bc601f63642cc7e19df171

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Citations in the corpus

Small vs. large dust grains in transitional disks: do different cavity sizes indicate a planet? - SAO 206462 (HD 135344B) in polarized light with VLT/NACO (2013, methodology): “We use the results by Dodson-Robinson & Salyk (2011) and Pinilla et al. (2012) to determine a testable range of realistic locations for that object and, then, infer its mass.”
Planet-Disk Interaction and Orbital Evolution (2012, background): “This possibility has been studied by Quillen et al. (2004), Varnière et al. (2006), Dodson-Robinson & Salyk (2011), and Zhu et al. (2011).”
Ring shaped dust accumulation in transition disks (2012, background): “In spite of the fact that the outer gap edge in the gas is at most 5 rH (see e.g. Dodson-Robinson & Salyk 2011), we find that the location where dust accumulates (i.e., the location of the maximum of the pressure) is at ∼ 7 rH for 1 and 3 MJup planets, and ∼ 10 rH for planets with Mp ≥ 5 MJup.”
LkCa 15: A YOUNG EXOPLANET CAUGHT AT FORMATION? (2011, background): “This discrepancy could indicate that there are other, less luminous planets in the system and we simply can not detect them yet, a possibility that has been suggested to explain the wide cleared gaps for many transitional disks (e.g., Zhu et al. 2011; Dodson-Robinson & Salyk 2011).”
DUST FILTRATION BY PLANET-INDUCED GAP EDGES: IMPLICATIONS FOR TRANSITIONAL DISKS (2012, background): “On the other hand, Dodson-Robinson & Salyk (2011) speculated that dust may be significantly confined in the spiral density wakes or streamers.”
The Disk Substructures at High Angular Resolution Project (DSHARP). VII. The Planet–Disk Interactions Interpretation (2018, background): “…migration and gap opening, more recently efforts have been dedicated to studying observable disk features induced by planets (Wolf & D’Angelo 2005; Dodson-Robinson & Salyk 2011; Zhu et al. 2011; Gonzalez et al. 2012; Pinilla et al. 2012; Ataiee et al. 2013; Bae et al. 2016; Kanagawa et al. 2016;…”
Gas density drops inside dust cavities of transitional disks around young stars observed with ALMA (2015, background): “The decrease in gas density due to companion clearing depends on the mass of the companion and other parameters such as the viscosity (Zhu et al. 2011; Dodson-Robinson & Salyk 2011; Pinilla et al. 2012; Mulders et al. 2013; Fung et al. 2014).”
Survival of molecular gas in cavities of transition disks - I. CO (2013, background): “Low gas masses in the gap (δgas < 3× 10−5) on the other hand are hard to achieve with planet clearing, even in the case of multiple systems (Dodson-Robinson & Salyk 2011; Zhu et al. 2011).”
HOW EMPTY ARE DISK GAPS OPENED BY GIANT PLANETS (2013, background): “…are surprisingly large; one gap opened by a single planet would be too narrow to explain the observed cavity sizes that range up to∼100 AU, and so a given system might have to contain multiple super-Jovian planets to clear a wide enough swath (e.g., Zhu et al. 2011; Dodson-Robinson and Salyk 2011).”
Resolved gas cavities in transitional disks inferred from CO isotopologs with ALMA (2015, background): “…cavities are only an indirect consequence of planet clearing: a planet will lower the gas surface density along its orbit, creating a gas gap with a pressure bump at its outer edge where the millimeter-sized dust is trapped (e.g., Zhu et al. 2011; Dodson-Robinson & Salyk 2011; Pinilla et al. 2012).”
Observational Signatures of Planets in Protoplanetary Disks I: Gaps Opened by Single and Multiple Young Planets in Disks (2014, background): “Theoretical studies in the past have shown that multiple planets are able to create wide gaps in the gas surface density (Zhu et al. 2011; Dodson-Robinson & Salyk 2011), which resemble the appearance of cavities in transitional disks (Espaillat et al. 2014).”
Magellan Adaptive Optics Imaging of PDS 70: Measuring the Mass Accretion Rate of a Young Giant Planet within a Gapped Disk (2018, background): “…optics (AO) systems (Hashimoto et al. 2012, Dong et al. 2012, Long et al. 2018), providing motivation for direct imaging searches to test the hypothesis that PDS 70’s gap has been cleared by the recent formation of one or more giant planets, as generally predicted by Dodson-Robinson & Salyk (2011).”
Gaps and Rings in an ALMA Survey of Disks in the Taurus Star-forming Region (2018, methodology): “If we simply assume that the gap radius corresponds to 4RHill (Dodson-Robinson & Salyk 2011), most of our gaps are related to planets with mass of 0.1–0.5MJ, as shown in Figure 9.”