Planet-driven Spiral Arms in Protoplanetary Disks. I. Formation Mechanism

Protoplanetary disk simulations show that a single planet can excite more than one spiral arm, possibly explaining the recent observations of multiple spiral arms in some systems. In this paper, we explain the mechanism by which a planet excites multiple spiral arms in a protoplanetary disk. Contrary to previous speculations, the formation of both primary and additional arms can be understood as a linear process when the planet mass is sufficiently small. A planet resonantly interacts with epicyclic oscillations in the disk, launching spiral wave modes around the Lindblad resonances. When a set of wave modes is in phase, they can constructively interfere with each other and create a spiral arm. More than one spiral arm can form because such constructive interference can occur for different sets of wave modes, with the exact number and launching position of the spiral arms being dependent on the planet mass as well as the disk temperature profile. Nonlinear effects become increasingly important as the planet mass increases, resulting in spiral arms with stronger shocks and thus larger pitch angles. This is found to be common for both primary and additional arms. When a planet has a sufficiently large mass (gsim3 thermal masses for (h/r) p = 0.1), only two spiral arms form interior to its orbit. The wave modes that would form a tertiary arm for smaller mass planets merge with the primary arm. Improvements in our understanding of the formation of spiral arms can provide crucial insights into the origin of observed spiral arms in protoplanetary disks

Studies of Young, Star-forming Circumstellar Disks

Disks of gas and dust around forming stars -- circumstellar disks -- last only a few million years. This is a very small fraction of the entire lifetime of Sun-like stars, several billion years. Nevertheless, by the time circumstellar disks dissipate stars complete building up their masses, giant planets finish accreting gas, and terrestrial bodies are nearly fully grown and ready for their final assembly to become planets. Understanding the evolution of circumstellar disks are thus crucial in many contexts. Using numerical simulations as the primary tool, my thesis has focused on the studies of various physical processes that can occur throughout the lifetime of circumstellar disks, from their formation to dispersal. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 emphasize the importance of early evolution, during which time a forming star-disk system obtains mass from its natal cloud: the infall phase. In Chapter 2 and 3, I have modeled episodic outbursts of accretion in protostellar systems resulting from disk instabilities -- gravitational instability and magnetorotational instability. I showed that outbursts occur preferentially during the infall phase, because the mass addition provides more favorable conditions for gravitational instability to initiate the outburst cycle, and that forming stars build up a significant fraction of their masses through repeated short-lived, episodic outbursts. The infall phase can also be important for the formation of planets. Recent ALMA observations revealed sets of bright and dark rings in circumstellar disks of young, forming stars, potentially indicating early formation of planets. In Chapter 4, I showed that infall streams can create radial pressure bumps near the outer edge of the mass landing on the disk, from which vortices can form, collecting solid particles very efficiently to make initial seeds of planets. The next three chapters highlight the role of planets in setting the observational appearance and the evolution of circumstellar disks. When a planet forms in a disk, the gravitational interaction between the planet and disk can create structures, such as spiral arms and gaps. In Chapter 5, I compared the disk structures formed by planetary companions in numerical simulations with the observed structures in the disk surrounding an 8 Myr-old Herbig Ae star SAO 206462. Based on the experiments, I made predictions for the mass and position of a currently unrevealed planet, which can help guide future observations to search for more conclusive evidence for the existence of a planetary companion in the system. In Chapter 6, I showed for the first time in global simulation domains that spiral waves, driven for instance by planets or gravitational instability, can be unstable due to resonant interactions with inertial modes, breaking into turbulence. In Chapter 7, I showed that the spiral wave instability operates on the waves launched by planets and that the resulting turbulence can significantly stir up solid particles from the disk midplane. The stirring of solid particles can have influences on the observation appearance of the parent disk and on the subsequent assembly of planetary bodies in the disk. Finally, in Chapter 8, I investigated the dispersal of circumstellar disks via photoevaporative winds, finding that the photoevaporative loss alone, coupled with a range of initial angular momenta of protostellar clouds, can explain the observed decline of the disk frequency with increasing age. The findings and future possibilities are summarized in Chapter 9.PHDAstronomy and AstrophysicsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/137100/1/jaehbae_1.pd

Diverse protoplanetary disk morphology produced by a Jupiter-mass planet

Combining hydrodynamic planet-disk interaction simulations with dust evolution models, we show that protoplanetary disks having a giant planet can reveal diverse morphology in (sub-)millimeter continuum, including a full disk without significant radial structure, a transition disk with an inner cavity, a disk with a single gap and a central continuum peak, and a disk with multiple rings and gaps. Such a diversity originates from (1) the level of viscous transport in the disk which determines the number of gaps a planet can open; (2) the size and spatial distributions of grains determined by the coagulation, fragmentation, and radial drift, which in turn affects the emmisivity of the disk at (sub-)millimeter wavelengths; and (3) the angular resolution used to observe the disk. In particular, our results show that disks having the same underlying gas distribution can have very different grain size/spatial distributions and thus appearance in continuum, depending on the interplay among coagulation, fragmentation, and radial drift. This suggests that proper treatments for the grain growth have to be included in models of protoplanetary disks concerning continuum properties and that complementary molecular line observations are highly desired in addition to continuum observations to reveal the true nature of disks. The fact that a single planet can produce diverse disk morphology emphasizes the need to search for more direct, localized signatures of planets in order to confirm (or dispute) the planetary origin of observed ringed substructures.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, Accepted for publication in the ApJ Letter