Protostars and Planets VI, Heidelberg, July 15-20, 2013

Poster 2B040

Tracing characteristic perturbations resulting from Planet-Disk and Binary-Disk interaction in protoplanetary disks

Ruge, Jan Philipp (University of Kiel, Germany)
Wolf, Sebastian (University of Kiel, Germany)
Uribe, Ana (University of Chicago, USA)
Demidova, Tatiana (Pulkovo Observatory, St. Petersburg, Russia)
Klahr, Hubert (MPIA, Heidelberg, Germany)
Grinin, Vladimir (Pulkovo Observatory/ Sobolev Institute, St. Petersburg, Russia)

Abstract:
The perturbation by an additional, gravitating component (planet, binary star) within a protoplanetary disk induces characteristic large-scale structures in the disk density profile. We investigate the observability of these perturbations. On the basis of a large number of (M)HD and SPH simulations, we calculate synthetic scattered and polarized light images as well as thermal re-emission maps of these models and predict the observational results for different instruments from the optical to the (sub)mm wavelength range with a special focus on ALMA. In the first study (A) (Ruge et al., 2013a,c) we investigate the observability of the planet-disk interaction for different star-disk-planet configurations. We predict that ALMA is able to observe planet-induced gaps around stars of various types and for a large range of disk masses. Besides this, we find that ALMA can trace small, local perturbations indicating zonal flows in the disk. The detectability of gaps in scattered light is limited to a range of total disk masses between 1e-4 M_sun and 1e-6 M_sun. Gap detections in both wavelength ranges are feasible for M_disk ~ 1e-4 M_sun. In our second study (B) (Ruge et al. 2013b) we investigate the observability of perturbations in young circumbinary disks for several orbital elements of the binary system. We find that ALMA will allow one to trace characteristic AU-sized spiral arm features in disks in face-on orientation and also to detect binary-induced perturbations in the edge-on brightness profiles. We find that the technique of differential polarimetry offers the potential for significantly clearer detections of these disk structures than imaging in scattered light alone.

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