English

A Circumplanetary Disk Around PDS70c

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2021-08-17 v1 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

PDS70 is a unique system in which two protoplanets, PDS70b and c, have been discovered within the dust-depleted cavity of their disk, at \sim22 and 34au respectively, by direct imaging at infrared wavelengths. Subsequent detection of the planets in the Hα\alpha line indicates that they are still accreting material through circumplanetary disks. In this Letter, we present new Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations of the dust continuum emission at 855μ\mum at high angular resolution (\sim20mas, 2.3au) that aim to resolve the circumplanetary disks and constrain their dust masses. Our observations confirm the presence of a compact source of emission co-located with PDS70c, spatially separated from the circumstellar disk and less extended than \sim1.2au in radius, a value close to the expected truncation radius of the cicumplanetary disk at a third of the Hill radius. The emission around PDS70c has a peak intensity of \sim86±\pm16 μJy beam1\mu \mathrm{Jy}~\mathrm{beam}^{-1} which corresponds to a dust mass of \sim0.031M_{\oplus} or \sim0.007M_{\oplus}, assuming that it is only constituted of 1 μ\mum or 1 mm sized grains, respectively. We also detect extended, low surface brightness continuum emission within the cavity near PDS70b. We observe an optically thin inner disk within 18au of the star with an emission that could result from small micron-sized grains transported from the outer disk through the orbits of b and c. In addition, we find that the outer disk resolves into a narrow and bright ring with a faint inner shoulder.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2108.07123,
  title  = {A Circumplanetary Disk Around PDS70c},
  author = {Myriam Benisty and Jaehan Bae and Stefano Facchini and Miriam Keppler and Richard Teague and Andrea Isella and Nicolas T. Kurtovic and Laura M. Perez and Anibal Sierra and Sean M. Andrews and John Carpenter and Ian Czekala and Carsten Dominik and Thomas Henning and Francois Menard and Paola Pinilla and Alice Zurlo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.07123},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

ApJ Letters, in press; 19 pages, 9 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-24T05:09:13.853Z