Three Radial Gaps in the Disk of TW Hydrae Imaged with SPHERE
By R. van Boekel, Th. Henning, J. Menu, J. D. Boer, Maud Langlois, A. Müller, H. Avenhaus, A. Boccaletti, H. Schmid, C. Thalmann and 17 more. 2016
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We present scattered light images of the TW Hya disk performed with the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch instrument in Polarimetric Differential Imaging mode at 0.63, 0.79, 1.24, and 1.62 μm. We also present H2/H3-band angular differential imaging (ADI) observations. Three distinct radial depressions in the polarized intensity distribution are seen, around ≈85, ≈21, and ≲6 au. The overall intensity distribution has a high degree of azimuthal symmetry; the disk is somewhat brighter than average toward the south and darker toward the north–west. The ADI observations yielded no signifiant detection of point sources in the disk. Our observations have a linear spatial resolution of 1–2 au, similar to that of recent ALMA dust continuum observations. The sub-micron-sized dust grains that dominate the light scattering in the disk surface are strongly coupled to the gas. We created a radiative transfer disk model with self-consistent temperature and vertical structure iteration and including grain size-dependent dust settling. This method may provide independent constraints on the gas distribution at higher spatial resolution than is feasible with ALMA gas line observations. We find that the gas surface density in the “gaps” is reduced by ≈50% to ≈80% relative to an unperturbed model. Should embedded planets be responsible for carving the gaps then their masses are at most a few 10 . The observed gaps are wider, with shallower flanks, than expected for planet–disk interaction with such low-mass planets. If forming planetary bodies have undergone collapse and are in the “detached phase,” then they may be directly observable with future facilities such as the Mid-Infrared E-ELT Imager and Spectrograph at the E-ELT.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fc660f60fa432e45450d72c8360eb6d9d53a1223
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Citations in the corpus
- The Disk Substructures at High Angular Resolution Project (DSHARP). II. Characteristics of Annular Substructures (2018, background): “…al. 2018; Long et al. 2018a), but have also been observed in scattered light tracing sub-micron-sized dust grains in the disk atmosphere (e.g., van Boekel et al. 2017; Avenhaus et al. 2018; Muro-Arena et al. 2018) and in molecular emission (e.g., Isella et al. 2016; Fedele et al. 2017; Teague et…”
- Discovery of a planetary-mass companion within the gap of the transition disk around PDS 70 (2018, background): “…Muto et al. 2012; Grady et al. 2013; Tang et al. 2017), and multiple rings (e.g. de Boer et al. 2016; Ginski et al. 2016; Andrews et al. 2016; van Boekel et al. 2017; Pohl et al. 2017a; Bertrang et al. 2018), as well as shadowed regions and brightness dips, some of them varying with time (e.g.…”
- Phantom: A Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics and Magnetohydrodynamics Code for Astrophysics (2017, background): “…gaps for low mass planets appears to be observed in recent observations of the TW Hya protoplanetary disc, by comparing VLT-SPHERE imaging of the scattered light emission from small dust grains (van Boekel et al. 2017; tracing the gas) to ALMA images of the mm dust emission (Andrews et al., 2016).”
- SPHERE: the exoplanet imager for the Very Large Telescope (2019, background): “…light, mainly dust scattering from circumstellar disks around young stars (e.g., Garufi et al. 2016; Stolker et al. 2016; Benisty et al. 2017; van Boekel et al. 2017), but also dust scattering in the wind of mass loosing red giants and supergiants (Khouri et al. 2016; Kervella et al. 2016;…”