English

Physical and Chemical Characterization of GY 91's Multi-ringed Protostellar Disk with ALMA

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics 2026-02-16 v2 Astrophysics of Galaxies Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

GY 91, commonly categorized as a Class I young stellar object, is notable for disk dust substructures that have been hypothesized to trace early planet formation. Using the ALMA 12-m and ACA arrays, we present new Band 7 dust continuum and molecular line observations of GY 91 at an angular resolution of (~40 au). We report detections of CS J=65J=6-5, N2_2H+^+ J=32J=3-2, C18^{18}O J=32J=3-2, H2_2CS JKa,Kc=81,771,6J_{K_a, K_c} = 8_{1,7}-7_{1,6}, H2_2CO JKa,Kc=40,430,3J_{K_a, K_c} = 4_{0,4}-3_{0,3}, and H2_2CO JKa,Kc=42,332,2J_{K_a, K_c} = 4_{2,3}-3_{2,2}, as well as a tentative detection of 13^{13}C18^{18}O J=32J=3-2. We observe azimuthal asymmetry in CS and H2_2CS emission, as well as radially structured H2_2CO 40,430,34_{0,4}-3_{0,3} emission outside the dust continuum. C18^{18}O and H2_2CO 40,430,3_{0,4}-3_{0,3} show significant cloud contamination, while CS and N2_2H+^+ are good tracers of Keplerian rotation originating from the disk. Envelope emission does not appear to contribute significantly either to the continuum or molecular line observations. GY 91's chemical properties appear in large part to resemble those of Class II disks, although observations of additional molecular probes should be obtained for a fuller comparison. With CS, we estimated a dynamical stellar mass of 0.58 MM_\odot, which is higher than previous estimates from stellar evolutionary models (0.25 MM_\odot). Using both radiative transfer modeling of the dust continuum and comparison of the C18^{18}O and N2_2H+^+ fluxes to literature thermochemical models, we estimate a disk mass of 0.01\sim0.01 MM_\odot.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.18884,
  title  = {Physical and Chemical Characterization of GY 91's Multi-ringed Protostellar Disk with ALMA},
  author = {Sally D. Jiang and Jane Huang and Ian Czekala and Leon Trapman and Yuri Aikawa and Sean M. Andrews and Jaehan Bae and Edwin A. Bergin and Charles J. Law and Romane Le Gal and Feng Long and François Ménard and Karin I. Öberg and Chunhua Qi and Richard Teague and David Wilner and Ke Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.18884},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted for Publication in ApJ, 28 pages, 10 Figures (in text), 9 tables