An SMA Molecular Inventory of the Edge-on Protoplanetary Disk Gomez's Hamburger
Abstract
Gomez's Hamburger (IRAS 18059-3211, GoHam) is a massive, edge-on protoplanetary disk that is potentially gravitationally unstable and hosts an overdensity that may be the site of a forming giant planet, making it a particularly interesting source for the study of planet formation in the direct collapse scenario. In this study, we present a molecular inventory of GoHam's disk combining several Submillimeter Array observations for a wideband survey at an angular resolution on the order of ~1 arcsecond. We detect 11 different molecules, including 15 individual lines, and measure their disk-integrated fluxes. We also infer column densities for several species over a range of fixed excitation temperatures. We find that the molecular inventory of GoHam and the inferred column densities for select molecules are broadly consistent with the general population of large protoplanetary disks. We explore the putative gravitational instability (GI) in GoHam's disk via possible enhancements in the gas-phase HCO abundance, but find no definitive evidence of GI. The results of this study can guide future, higher-resolution studies of GoHam, as well as efforts to characterize the giant protoplanet candidate GoHam b.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.26512,
title = {An SMA Molecular Inventory of the Edge-on Protoplanetary Disk Gomez's Hamburger},
author = {Erin M. Cusson and Lisa Wölfer and Richard Teague and Joshua B. Lovell and Chunhua Qi and Sean M. Andrews and Thomas J. Haworth and John D. Ilee and Marija R. Jankovic and Charles J. Law and Romane le Gal and Karin I. Öberg and David Wilner},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.26512},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
15 pages, 7 figures; Accepted for publication in ApJ