A Dust-trapping Ring in the Planet-hosting Disk of Elias 2-24

Abstract

Rings and gaps are among the most widely observed forms of substructure in protoplanetary disks. A gap–ring pair may be formed when a planet carves a gap in the disk, which produces a local pressure maximum following the gap that traps inwardly drifting dust grains and appears as a bright ring owing to the enhanced dust density. A dust-trapping ring would provide a promising environment for solid growth and possibly planetesimal production via the streaming instability. We present evidence of dust trapping in the bright ring of the planet-hosting disk Elias 2-24, from the analysis of 1.3 and 3 mm Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array observations at high spatial resolution (0.″029, 4.0 au). We leverage the high spatial resolution to demonstrate that larger grains are more efficiently trapped and place constraints on the local turbulence (8 × 10 ^−4 < α _turb < 0.03) and the gas-to-dust ratio (Σ _g /Σ _d < 30) in the ring. Using a scattering-included marginal probability analysis, we measure a total dust disk mass of ${M}_{\mathrm{dust}}={13.8}_{-0.5}^{+0.7}\times {10}^{-4}\ {M}_{\odot }$ . We also show that at the orbital radius of the proposed perturber the gap is cleared of material down to a flux contrast of 10 ^−3 of the peak flux in the disk.

Keywords

• Young stellar objects
• Protoplanetary disks
• Exoplanet formation
• Millimeter astronomy
• High angular resolution
• Dust continuum emission