Related papers: Peering through the veil: Investigating protoplane…
As the earliest stage of planet formation, massive, optically thick, and gas rich protoplanetary disks provide key insights into the physics of star and planet formation. When viewed edge-on, high resolution images offer a unique…
Dust particles are the building blocks from which planetary bodies are made. A major goal of the studies of planet-forming disks is to constrain the properties of dust particles and aggregates in order to trace their origin, structure, and…
Spiral structures are a common feature in scattered-light images of protoplanetary disks, and of great interest as possible tracers of the presence of planets. However, other mechanisms have been put foward to explain them, including…
Many protostellar disks show central cavities, rings, or spiral arms likely caused by low-mass stellar or planetary companions, yet few such features are conclusively tied to bodies embedded in the disks. We note that even small features on…
Transition disks are considered sites of ongoing planet formation, and their dust and gas distributions could be signposts of embedded planets. The transition disk around the T Tauri star RY Lup has an inner dust cavity and displays a…
Direct imaging observations of protoplanetary disks at near-infrared (NIR) wavelengths have revealed structures of potentially planetary origin. Investigations of observational signatures from planet-induced features have so far focused on…
We study scattered light properties of protoplanetary discs at near-infrared wavelengths for various dust size and structure by performing radiative transfer simulations. We show that different dust structures might be probed by measuring…
The expectation that aerodynamic drag will force the solids in a gas-rich protoplanetary disk to spiral in toward the host star on short timescales is one of the fundamental problems in planet formation theory. The nominal efficiency of…
The assembly and architecture of planetary systems strongly depend on the physical processes governing the evolution and dispersal of protoplanetary disks. Since Protostars and Planets VI, new observations and theoretical insights favor…
This tutorial is an introduction to observational studies of dust transport and evolution in protoplanetary disks. Spatially resolved observations of disks at multiple wavelengths can allow to infer the distribution of various dust grains…
We review the properties of dust in protoplanetary disks around optically visible pre-main sequence stars obtained with a variety of observational techniques, from measurements of scattered light at visual and infrared wavelengths to…
The formation scenario of a gapped disk, i.e., transitional disk, and its asymmetry is still under debate. Proposed scenarios such as disk-planet interaction, photoevaporation, grain growth, anticyclonic vortex, eccentricity, and their…
One of the striking discoveries of protoplanetary disc research in recent years are the spiral arms seen in several transitional discs in polarised scattered light. An interesting interpretation of the observed spiral features is that they…
Observations of protoplanetary disks (PPDs) at sub-mm wavelengths suggest that polarisation is caused by scattering of thermal radiation. Most of the dust models that are used to explain these observations have major drawbacks: They either…
We study the effects of an annular gap induced by an embedded proto-planet on disk scattered light images and the infrared spectral energy distribution. We find that the outer edge of a gap is brighter in the scattered light images than a…
We study the evolution and final dispersal of protoplanetary discs that evolve under the action of internal and external photoevaporation, and different degrees of viscous transport. We identify five distinct dispersal pathways, which are…
(Abridged) We attempt to characterize the radial distribution of dust in disks around a sample of young stars from an observational point of view, and, when possible, in a model-independent way, by using parametric laws. We used the IRAM…
The vertical thickness of debris discs is often used as a measure of these systems' dynamical excitation and as clues to the presence of hidden massive perturbers such as planetary embryos. However, this argument could be flawed because the…
Planets form in young circumstellar disks called protoplanetary disks. However, it is still difficult to catch planet formation in-situ. Nevertheless, from recent ALMA/SPHERE data, encouraging evidence of the direct and indirect presence of…
Spatially resolved scattered-light images of circumstellar (CS) debris in exoplanetary systems constrain the physical properties and orbits of the dust particles in these systems. They also inform on co-orbiting (but unseen) planets,…