The connection between the nature of a protoplanetary disk and that of a debris disk is not well understood. Dust evolution, planet formation, and disk dissipation likely play a role in the processes involved. We aim to reconcile both manifestations
of dusty circumstellar disks through a study of optically thin Class III disks and how they correlate to younger and older disks. In this work, we collect literature and ALMA archival millimeter fluxes for 85 disks (8%) of all Class III disks across nearby star-forming regions. We derive millimeter-dust masses $M_{text{dust}}$ and compare these with Class II and debris disk samples in the context of excess infrared luminosity, accretion rate, and age. The mean $M_{text{dust}}$ of Class III disks is $0.29 pm 0.19~M_{oplus}$. We propose a new evolutionary scenario wherein radial drift is very efficient for non-structured disks during the Class II phase resulting in a rapid decrease of $M_{text{dust}}$. However, we find long infrared protoplanetary disk timescales of ${sim}$8~Myr, which are consistent with overall slow disk evolution. In structured disks, the presence of dust traps allows for the formation of planetesimal belts at large radii, such as those observed in debris disks. We propose therefore that the planetesimal belts in debris disks are the result of dust traps in structured disks, whereas protoplanetary disks without dust traps decrease in dust mass through radial drift and are therefore undetectable as debris disks after the gas has dissipated. These results provide a hypothesis for a novel view of disk evolution.
ALMA has revolutionized our view of protoplanetary disks, revealing structures such as gaps, rings and asymmetries that indicate dust trapping as an important mechanism in the planet formation process. However, the high resolution images have also sh
own that the optically thin assumption for millimeter continuum emission may not be valid and the low values of the spectral index may be related to optical depth rather than dust growth. Longer wavelength observations are essential to properly disentangle these effects. The high sensitivity and spatial resolution of the next-generation Very Large Array (ngVLA) will open up the possibilities to spatially resolve disk continuum emission at centimeter wavelengths and beyond, which allows the study of dust growth in disks in the optically thin regime and further constrain models of planet formation.
Debris disks are tenuous, dust-dominated disks commonly observed around stars over a wide range of ages. Those around main sequence stars are analogous to the Solar Systems Kuiper Belt and Zodiacal light. The dust in debris disks is believed to be co
ntinuously regenerated, originating primarily with collisions of planetesimals. Observations of debris disks provide insight into the evolution of planetary systems; the composition of dust, comets, and planetesimals outside the Solar System; as well as placing constraints on the orbital architecture and potentially the masses of exoplanets that are not otherwise detectable. This review highlights recent advances in multiwavelength, high-resolution scattered light and thermal imaging that have revealed a complex and intricate diversity of structures in debris disks, and discusses how modeling methods are evolving with the breadth and depth of the available observations. Two rapidly advancing subfields highlighted in this review include observations of atomic and molecular gas around main sequence stars, and variations in emission from debris disks on very short (days to years) timescales, providing evidence of non-steady state collisional evolution particularly in young debris disks.
We present submillimeter observations of the young brown dwarfs KPNO Tau 1, KPNO Tau 3, and KPNO Tau 6 at 450 micron and 850 micron taken with the Submillimeter Common-User Bolometer Array on the James Clerke Maxwell Telescope. KPNO Tau 3 and KPNO Ta
u 6 have been previously identified as Class II objects hosting accretion disks, whereas KPNO Tau 1 has been identified as a Class III object and shows no evidence of circumsubstellar material. Our 3 sigma detection of cold dust around KPNO Tau 3 implies a total disk mass of (4.0 +/- 1.1) x 10^{-4} Msolar (assuming a gas to dust ratio of 100:1). We place tight constraints on any disks around KPNO Tau 1 or KPNO Tau 6 of <2.1 x 10^{-4} Msolar and <2.7 x 10^{-4} Msolar, respectively. Modeling the spectral energy distribution of KPNO Tau 3 and its disk suggests the disk properties (geometry, dust mass, and grain size distribution) are consistent with observations of other brown dwarf disks and low-mass T-Tauri stars. In particular, the disk-to-host mass ratio for KPNO Tau 3 is congruent with the scenario that at least some brown dwarfs form via the same mechanism as low-mass stars.
