ALMA Observation of the Protoplanetary Disk around WW Cha: Faint Double-peaked Ring and Asymmetric Structure

Abstract

Abstract We present Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) Band 6 observations of dust continuum emission of the disk around WW Cha. The dust continuum image shows a smooth disk structure with a faint (low-contrast) dust ring, extending from ∼40 au to ∼70 au, not accompanied by any gap. We constructed the simple model to fit the visibility of the observed data by using the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method and found that the bump (we call the ring without the gap the bump) has two peaks at 40 au and 70 au. The residual map between the model and observation indicates asymmetric structures at the center and the outer region of the disk. These asymmetric structures are also confirmed by model-independent analysis of the imaginary part of the visibility. The asymmetric structure at the outer region is consistent with a spiral observed by SPHERE. To constrain physical quantities of the disk (dust density and temperature), we carried out radiative transfer simulations. We found that the midplane temperature around the outer peak is close to the freezing temperature of CO on water ice (∼30 K). The temperature around the inner peak is about 50 K, which is close to the freezing temperature of H2S and also close to the sintering temperature of several species. We also discuss the size distribution of the dust grains using the spectral index map obtained within the Band 6 data.