Tracing Planets in Circumstellar Discs

Jan Philipp Ruge,Hubert H Klahr,Sebastian Wolf,Ana L Uribe

doi:10.1051/epjconf/20134602003

Abstract

60637 Abstract. Planets are assumed to form in circumstellar discs around young stellar objects. The additional gravitational potential of a planet perturbs the disc and leads to charac- teristic structures, i.e. spiral waves and gaps, in the disc density profile. We perform a large-scale parameter study on the observability of these planet-induced structures in circumstellar discs in the (sub)mm wavelength range for the Atacama Large (Sub)Milli- meter Array (ALMA). On the basis of hydrodynamical and magneto-hydrodynamical simulations of star-disc-planet models we calculate the disc temperature structure and (sub)mm images of these systems. These are used to derive simulated ALMA maps. Be- cause appropriate objects are frequent in the Taurus-Auriga region, we focus on a distance of 140 pc and a declination of 20 . The explored range of star-disc-planet configura- tions consists of six hydrodynamical simulations (including magnetic fields and dierent planet masses), nine disc sizes with outer radii ranging from 9 AU to 225 AU, 15 total disc masses in the range between 2:67 10 7 M and 4:10 10 2 M , six dierent central stars and two dierent

Highlights

An early configuration of the Atacama Large (Sub)Millimeter Array (ALMA) became available only recently, its capabilities and its potential for groundbreaking discoveries have already been demonstrated to be enormous [e.g., 3]
The explored range of star-disc-planet configurations consists of six hydrodynamical simulations, nine disc sizes with outer radii ranging from 9 AU to 225 AU, 15 total disc masses in the range between 2.67 · 10−7 M and 4.10 · 10−2 M, six different central stars and two different grain size distributions, resulting in 10 000 disc models
At almost all scales and in particular down to a scale of a few AU, ALMA is able to trace disc structures induced by planet-disc interaction or the influence of magnetic fields in the wavelength range between 0.4 . . . 2.0 mm

Summary

Introduction

An early configuration of the Atacama Large (Sub)Millimeter Array (ALMA) became available only recently, its capabilities and its potential for groundbreaking discoveries have already been demonstrated to be enormous [e.g., 3]. After the completion of the entire array, ALMA will allow one to observe the density structure of young circumstellar discs in unprecedented detail. In either case the gravitational potential of a planet perturbs the hosting disc [12, 13], resulting in large-scale structures, such as gaps and spiral density waves [13, 14]. We consider non-radiative hydrodynamical simulations as a more conservative disc approximation when evaluating the observability of planet induced gaps. Due to the much lower optical depth in the (sub)mm regime, observations in this wavelength range are better suited to directly trace the density structure of the disc interior. For high angular resolution observations in this wavelength range large interferometer arrays, like ALMA, are required

Model Setup

Results

Conclusions