Extinction Values toward Embedded Planets in Protoplanetary Disks Estimated from Hydrodynamic Simulations

Abstract

Upcoming new coronographs with deeper contrast limits, together with planned and current high-contrast imaging campaigns, will push the detectability limit of protoplanets. These planet-hunting campaigns present a new opportunity to characterize protoplanets and their surrounding environments. However, there are clear uncertainties as to what the extinction levels are at different regions of protoplanetary disks, which will impede our ability to characterize young planets. A correct understanding of the expected extinction, together with multiple photometric observations, will lead to constraints on the extinction levels, dust growth, disk evolution, and protoplanetary accretion rates. In this work, we used hydrodynamic simulations and protoplanetary disk observational constraints obtained from both dust and gas emission to explore the expected extinction maps for continuum filters associated with strong hydrogen lines as tracers of accretion and key broadband photometric filters. We provide a scaling relationship for the extinction as a function of planetary separation and disk mass for three different gas giant masses. We also report values for a subset of disks of interest targeted by multiple imaging campaigns. The described values will be useful for the optimal design of future planet-hunting surveys and for giving context to nondetections in protoplanetary disks and the observed fluxes of point sources along with the birth conditions of protoplanets.