English

Hints of planet formation signatures in a large-cavity disk studied in the AGE-PRO ALMA Large Program

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2025-06-13 v4

Abstract

Detecting planet signatures in protoplanetary disks is fundamental to understanding how and where planets form. In this work, we report dust and gas observational hints of planet formation in the disk around 2MASS-J16120668-301027, as part of the ALMA Large Program "AGE-PRO: ALMA survey of Gas Evolution in Protoplanetary disks". The disk was imaged with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) at Band 6 (1.3 mm) in dust continuum emission and four molecular lines: 12^{12}CO(J=2-1), 13^{13}CO(J=2-1), C18^{18}O(J=2-1), and H2_2CO(J=3(3,0)_{(3,0)}-2(2,0)_{(2,0)}). Resolved observations of the dust continuum emission (angular resolution of 150\sim 150 mas, 20 au) show a ring-like structure with a peak at 0.570.57 ^{\prime \prime} (75 au), a deep gap with a minimum at 0.24^{\prime \prime} (31 au), an inner disk, a bridge connecting the inner disk and the outer ring, along with a spiral arm structure, and a tentative detection (to 3σ3\sigma) of a compact emission at the center of the disk gap, with an estimated dust mass of 2.712.9\sim 2.7-12.9 Lunar masses. We also detected a kinematic kink (not coincident with any dust substructure) through several 12^{12}CO channel maps (angular resolution \sim 200 mas, 30 au), located at a radius of 0.875\sim 0.875^{\prime \prime} (115.6 au). After modeling the 12^{12}CO velocity rotation around the protostar, we identified a tentative rotating-like structure at the kink location with a geometry similar to that of the disk. We discuss potential explanations for the dust and gas substructures observed in the disk, and their potential connection to signatures of planet formation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2407.16651,
  title  = {Hints of planet formation signatures in a large-cavity disk studied in the AGE-PRO ALMA Large Program},
  author = {Anibal Sierra and Laura M. Pérez and Carolina Agurto-Gangas and James Miley and Ke Zhang and Paola Pinilla and Ilaria Pascucci and Leon Trapman and Nicolas Kurtovic and Miguel Vioque and Dingshan Deng and Rossella Anania and John Carpenter and Lucas A. Cieza and Camilo González-Ruilova and Michiel Hogerheijde and Aleksandra Kuznetsova and Giovanni P. Rosotti and Dary A. Ruiz-Rodriguez and Kamber Schwarz and Benoît Tabone and Estephani E. TorresVillanueva},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.16651},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

This paper is part of the ApJ special issue of AGE-PRO (Paper IX)