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Register a new userSpiral waves triggered by shadows in transition disks
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Circumstellar asymmetries such as central warps have recently been shown to cast shadows on outer disks. We investigate the hydrodynamical consequences of such variable illumination on the outer regions of a transition disk, and the development of spiral arms. Using 2D simulations, we follow the evolution of a gaseous disk passively heated by the central star, under the periodic forcing of shadows with an opening angle of $sim$28$^circ$. With a lower pressure under the shadows, each crossing results in a variable azimuthal acceleration, which in time develops into spiral density waves. Their pitch angles evolve from $Pi sim 15^circ-22^circ$ at the onset, to $sim$11$^circ$-14$^circ$, over $sim$65~AU to 150~AU. Self-gravity enhances the density contrast of the spiral waves, as also reported previously for spirals launched by planets. Our control simulations with unshadowed irradiation do not develop structures, except for a different form of spiral waves seen at later times only in the gravitationally unstable control case. Scattered light predictions in the $H$-band show that such illumination spirals should be observable. We suggest that spiral arms in the case-study transition disk HD~142527 could be explained as a result of shadowing from the tilted inner disk.
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Context. Despite the recent discovery of spiral-shaped features in protoplanetary discs in the near-infrared and millimetric wavelengths, there is still an active discussion to understand how they formed. In fact, the spiral waves observed in discs around young stars can be due to different physical mechanisms: planet/companion torques, gravitational perturbations or illumination effects. Aims. We study the spirals formed in the gaseous phase due to two diametrically opposed shadows cast at fixed disc locations. The shadows are created by an inclined non-precessing disc inside the cavity, which is assumed to be optically thick. In particular, we analyse the effect of these spirals on the dynamics of the dust particles and discuss their detectability in transition discs. Methods. We perform gaseous hydrodynamical simulations with shadows, then we compute the dust evolution on top of the gaseous distribution, and finally we produce synthetic ALMA observations of the dust emission based on radiative transfer calculations. Results. Our main finding is that mm- to cm-sized dust particles are efficiently trapped inside the shadow-triggered spirals. We also observe that particles of various sizes starting at different stellocentric distances are well mixed inside these pressure maxima. This dynamical effect would favour grain growth and affect the resulting composition of planetesimals in the disc. In addition, our radiative transfer calculations show spiral patterns in the disc at 1.6 {mu}m and 1.3 mm. Due to their faint thermal emission (compared to the bright inner regions of the disc) the spirals cannot be detected with ALMA. Our synthetic observations prove however that shadows are observable as dips in the thermal emission.
Shadows and spirals seem to be common features of transition discs. Among the spiral-triggering mechanisms proposed, only one establishes a causal link between shadows and spirals so far. In fact, provided the presence of shadows in the disc, the combined effect of temperature gradient and differential disc rotation, creates strong azimuthal pressure gradients. After several thousand years, grand-design spirals develop in the gas phase. Previous works have only considered static shadows caused by an inclined inner disc. However, in some cases, the inner regions of circumbinary discs can break and precess. Thus, it is more realistic to consider moving shadow patterns in the disc. In this configuration, the intersection between the inner and the outer discs defines the line of nodes at which the shadows are cast. Here, we consider moving shadows and study the resulting circumbinary disc structure. We find that only static and prograde shadows trigger spirals, in contrast to retrograde ones. Interestingly, if a region of the disc corotates with the shadow, a planet-like signature develops at the co-rotation position. The resulting spirals resemble those caused by a planet embedded in the disc, with similar pitch angles.
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 embedded planets has been identified in disks around young stars: co-moving point sources, gravitational perturbations, rings, cavities, and emission dips or shadows cast on disks. The interpretation of these observations needs a robust physical framework to deduce the complex disk geometry. In particular, protoplanetary disk models usually assume the gas pressure scale-height given by the ratio of the sound speed over the azimuthal velocity $H/r = c_{srm }/v_{rm k}$. By doing so, textit{radiative} pressure fields are often ignored, which could lead to a misinterpretation of the real vertical structure of such disks. We follow the evolution of a gaseous disk with an embedded Jupiter mass planet through hydrodynamical simulations, computing the disk scale-height including radiative pressure, which was derived from a generalization of the stellar atmosphere theory. We focus on the vertical impact of the radiative pressure in the vicinity of circumplanetary disks, where temperatures can reach $gtrsim 1000$ K for an accreting planet, and radiative forces can overcome gravitational forces from the planet. The radiation-pressure effects create a vertical optically thick column of gas and dust at the proto-planet location, casting a shadow in scattered light. This mechanism could explain the peculiar illumination patterns observed in some disks around young stars such as HD 169142 where a moving shadow has been detected, or the extremely high aspect-ratio $H/r sim 0.2$ observed in systems like AB Aur and CT Cha.
Recent observations of protoplanetary disks, as well as simulations of planet-disk interaction, have suggested that a single planet may excite multiple spiral arms in the disk, in contrast to the previous expectations based on linear theory (predicting a one-armed density wave). We re-assess the origin of multiple arms in the framework of linear theory, by solving for the global two-dimensional response of a non-barotropic disk to an orbiting planet. We show that the formation of a secondary arm in the inner disk, at about half of the orbital radius of the planet, is a robust prediction of linear theory. This arm becomes stronger than the primary spiral at several tenths of the orbital radius of the planet. Several additional, weaker spiral arms may also form in the inner disk. On the contrary, a secondary spiral arm is unlikely to form in the outer disk. Our linear calculations, fully accounting for the global behavior of both the phases and amplitudes of perturbations, generally support the recently proposed WKB phase argument for the secondary arm origin (as caused by the intricacy of constructive interference of azimuthal harmonics of the perturbation at different radii). We provide analytical arguments showing that the process of a single spiral wake splitting up into multiple arms is a generic linear outcome of wave propagation in differentially rotating disks. It is not unique to planet-driven waves and occurs also in linear calculations of spiral wakes freely propagating with no external torques. These results are relevant for understanding formation of multiple rings and gaps in protoplanetary disks.
Aside from the grand-design stellar spirals appearing in the disk of M81, a pair of stellar spiral arms situated well inside the bright bulge of M81 has been recently discovered by Kendall et al. (2008). The seemingly unrelated pairs of spirals pose a challenge to the theory of spiral density waves. To address this problem, we have constructed a three component model for M81, including the contributions from a stellar disk, a bulge, and a dark matter halo subject to observational constraints. Given this basic state for M81, a modal approach is applied to search for the discrete unstable spiral modes that may provide an understanding for the existence of both spiral arms. It is found that the apparently separated inner and outer spirals can be interpreted as a single trailing spiral mode. In particular, these spirals share the same pattern speed 25.5 km s$^{-1}$ kpc$^{-1}$ with a corotation radius of 9.03 kpc. In addition to the good agreement between the calculated and the observed spiral pattern, the variation of the spiral amplitude can also be naturally reproduced.
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