Seeing the unseen: a method to detect unresolved rings in protoplanetary disks
arxiv(2024)
摘要
While high resolution ALMA observations reveal a wealth of substructure in
protoplanetary discs, they remain incapable of resolving the types of small
scale dust structures predicted, for example, by numerical simulations of the
streaming instability. In this Letter, we propose a method to find evidence for
unresolved, optically thick dusty rings in protoplanetary disks. We demonstrate
that, in presence of unresolved rings, the brightness of an inclined disc
exhibits a distinctive emission peak at the minor axis. Furthermore, the
azimuthal brightness depends on both the geometry of the rings and the dust
optical properties; we can therefore use the azimuthal brightness variations to
both detect unresolved rings and probe their properties. By analyzing the
azimuthal brightness in the test-case of ring-like substructures formed by
streaming instability, we show that the resulting peak is likely detectable by
ALMA for typical disc parameters. Moreover, we present an analytic model that
not only qualitatively but also quantitatively reproduces the peak found in the
simulations, validating its applicability to infer the presence of unresolved
rings in observations and characterize their optical properties and shape. This
will contribute to the identification of disk regions where streaming
instability (and thus planet formation) is occurring.
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