Thermal Structure and Millimeter Emission from a Protoplanetary Disk with Embedded Protoplanets from Radiative Transfer Modeling

Abstract

The discovery of protoplanets and circumplanetary disks provides a unique opportunity to characterize planet formation through observations. Massive protoplanets shape the physical and chemical structure of their host circumstellar disk by accretion, localized emission, and disk depletion. In this work, we study the thermal changes induced within the disk by protoplanet accretion and synthetic predictions through hydrodynamical simulations with postprocessed radiative transfer with an emphasis on radio millimeter emission. We explored distinct growth conditions and varied both planetary accretion rates and the local dust-to-gas mass ratios for a protoplanet at 1200 K. The radiative transfer models show that beyond the effect of disk gaps, in most cases, the circumplanetary disk (CPD) and the planet’s emission locally increase the disk temperature. Moreover, depending on the local dust-to-gas depletion and accretion rate, the presence of the CPD may have detectable signatures in millimeter emission. It also has the power to generate azimuthal asymmetries that are important for continuum subtraction. Thus, if other means of detection of protoplanets are proven, the lack of corresponding evidence at other wavelengths can set limits on their growth timescales through a combined analysis of the local dust-to-gas ratio and the accretion rate.

Keywords

• Protoplanetary disks
• Submillimeter astronomy
• Planetary-disk interactions