English

Mapping Protoplanetary Disk Vertical Structure with CO Isotopologue Line Emission

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2023-05-17 v1 Astrophysics of Galaxies Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

High spatial resolution observations of CO isotopologue line emission in protoplanetary disks at mid-inclinations ({\approx}30-75{\deg}) allow us to characterize the gas structure in detail, including radial and vertical substructures, emission surface heights and their dependencies on source characteristics, and disk temperature profiles. By combining observations of a suite of CO isotopologues, we can map the 2D (r, z) disk structure from the disk upper atmosphere, as traced by CO, to near the midplane, as probed by less abundant isotopologues. Here, we present high angular resolution ({\lesssim}0."1 to {\approx}0."2; {\approx}15-30 au) observations of CO, 13^{13}CO, and C18^{18}O in either or both J=2-1 and J=3-2 lines in the transition disks around DM Tau, Sz 91, LkCa 15, and HD 34282. We derived line emission surfaces in CO for all disks and in 13^{13}CO for the DM Tau and LkCa 15 disks. With these observations, we do not resolve the vertical structure of C18^{18}O in any disk, which is instead consistent with C18^{18}O emission originating from the midplane. Both the J=2-1 and J=3-2 lines show similar heights. Using the derived emission surfaces, we computed radial and vertical gas temperature distributions for each disk, including empirical temperature models for the DM Tau and LkCa 15 disks. After combining our sample with literature sources, we find that 13^{13}CO line emitting heights are also tentatively linked with source characteristics, e.g., stellar host mass, gas temperature, disk size, and show steeper trends than seen in CO emission surfaces.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2212.08667,
  title  = {Mapping Protoplanetary Disk Vertical Structure with CO Isotopologue Line Emission},
  author = {Charles J. Law and Richard Teague and Karin I. Öberg and Evan A. Rich and Sean M. Andrews and Jaehan Bae and Myriam Benisty and Stefano Facchini and Kevin Flaherty and Andrea Isella and Sheng Jin and Jun Hashimoto and Jane Huang and Ryan A. Loomis and Feng Long and Carlos E. Muñoz-Romero and Teresa Paneque-Carreño and Laura M. Pérez and Chunhua Qi and Kamber R. Schwarz and Jochen Stadler and Takashi Tsukagoshi and David J. Wilner and Gerrit van der Plas},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.08667},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

31 pages, 15 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ. Image cubes available at https://zenodo.org/record/7430257

R2 v1 2026-06-28T07:39:30.117Z