MILLIMETER-WAVE POLARIZATION OF PROTOPLANETARY DISKS DUE TO DUST SCATTERING

By A. Kataoka, T. Muto, M. Momose, T. Tsukagoshi, M. Fukagawa, H. Shibai, T. Hanawa, K. Murakawa, C. Dullemond. 2015

141 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a new method to constrain the grain size in protoplanetary disks with polarization observations at millimeter wavelengths. If dust grains are grown to the size comparable to the wavelengths, the dust grains are expected to have a large scattering opacity, and thus the continuum emission is expected to be polarized due to self-scattering. We perform 3D radiative transfer calculations to estimate the polarization degree for the protoplanetary disks having radial Gaussian-like dust surface density distributions, which have been recently discovered. The maximum grain size is set to be 100 &mgr; m ?> and the observing wavelength to be 870 &mgr; m ?> . We find that the polarization degree is as high as 2.5% with a subarcsec spatial resolution, which is likely to be detected with near-future ALMA observations. The emission is polarized due to scattering of anisotropic continuum emission. The map of the polarization degree shows a double-peaked distribution, and the polarization vectors are in the radial direction in the inner ring and in the azimuthal direction in the outer ring. We also find the wavelength dependence of the polarization degree: the polarization degree is the highest if dust grains have a maximum size of a max ∼ λ / 2 &pgr; ?> , where λ is the observing wavelength. Hence, multi-wave and spatially resolved polarization observations toward protoplanetary disks enable us to put a constraint on the grain size. The constraint on the grain size from polarization observations is independent of or may be even stronger than that from the opacity index.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/be6abbc4642a930a332af79b00f92450d77b3287

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. T. Birnstiel
2. D. Wilner
3. S. Andrews
4. Xue-Ning Bai
5. C. Dullemond
6. Zhaohuan Zhu
7. L. Ricci
8. J. Carpenter

In Instrumentation

1. S. Andrews
2. T. Birnstiel
3. Xue-Ning Bai
4. D. Wilner
5. Zhaohuan Zhu
6. J. Carpenter
7. C. Dullemond
8. L. Ricci

Citations in the corpus

• One Solution to the Mass Budget Problem for Planet Formation: Optically Thick Disks with Dust Scattering (2019, background): “Recent works by Kataoka et al. (2015) and Yang et al. (2016a) have suggested that dust scattering may be crucial for explaining submm polarization measurements, despite the fact that other mechanisms may still be needed to explain the observations (Kataoka et al. 2017; Yang et al. 2016b).”