Inner walls or vortices? Crescent-shaped asymmetries in ALMA observations of protoplanetary discs

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Hauptverfasser: Ribas, Álvaro, Clarke, Cathie J., Zagaria, Francesco
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Ribas, Álvaro
Clarke, Cathie J.
Zagaria, Francesco
author_facet Ribas, Álvaro
Clarke, Cathie J.
Zagaria, Francesco
contents Crescent-shaped asymmetries are common in millimetre observations of protoplanetary discs and are usually attributed to vortices or dust overdensities. However, they often appear on a single side of the major axis and roughly symmetric about the minor axis, suggesting a geometric origin. In this work, we interpret such asymmetries as emission from the exposed inner cavity walls of inclined discs and use them to characterise their vertical extent. Here we focus on the discs around CIDA 9 and RY Tau, first modelling their observations in visibility space with a simple geometric prescription for the walls, and then exploring more detailed radiative transfer models. Accounting for the wall emission yields significantly better residuals than purely axisymmetric models, and we estimate the dust scale height of these systems to be 0.4 au at 37 au for CIDA 9 and 0.2 au at 12 au for RY Tau. Finally, we identify crescent-shaped asymmetries in twelve discs, nine of which have constraints on their orientation - in all cases, the asymmetry appears on the far-side of the disc, lending support to the hypothesis that they are due to their inner rims. Modelling this effect in larger samples of discs will help to build a statistical view of their vertical structure.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_14626
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Inner walls or vortices? Crescent-shaped asymmetries in ALMA observations of protoplanetary discs
Ribas, Álvaro
Clarke, Cathie J.
Zagaria, Francesco
Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
Solar and Stellar Astrophysics
Crescent-shaped asymmetries are common in millimetre observations of protoplanetary discs and are usually attributed to vortices or dust overdensities. However, they often appear on a single side of the major axis and roughly symmetric about the minor axis, suggesting a geometric origin. In this work, we interpret such asymmetries as emission from the exposed inner cavity walls of inclined discs and use them to characterise their vertical extent. Here we focus on the discs around CIDA 9 and RY Tau, first modelling their observations in visibility space with a simple geometric prescription for the walls, and then exploring more detailed radiative transfer models. Accounting for the wall emission yields significantly better residuals than purely axisymmetric models, and we estimate the dust scale height of these systems to be 0.4 au at 37 au for CIDA 9 and 0.2 au at 12 au for RY Tau. Finally, we identify crescent-shaped asymmetries in twelve discs, nine of which have constraints on their orientation - in all cases, the asymmetry appears on the far-side of the disc, lending support to the hypothesis that they are due to their inner rims. Modelling this effect in larger samples of discs will help to build a statistical view of their vertical structure.
title Inner walls or vortices? Crescent-shaped asymmetries in ALMA observations of protoplanetary discs
topic Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
Solar and Stellar Astrophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.14626