Spectral Energy Distributions of Accreting Protoplanets

Abstract

Planets are often invoked as the cause of inferred gaps or inner clearings in transition disks. These putative planets would interact with the remnant circumstellar disk, accreting gas and generating substantial luminosity. Here I explore the expected appearance of accreting protoplanets at a range of evolutionary states. I compare synthetic spectral energy distributions with the handful of claimed detections of substellar-mass companions in transition disks. While observed fluxes of candidate companions are generally compatible with accreting protoplanets, challenges remain in reconciling the extended structure inferred in observed objects with the compact emission expected from protoplanets or circumplanetary disks. I argue that a large fraction of transition disks should harbor bright protoplanets, and that more may be detected as larger telescopes open up additional parameter space.

Accepted for publication in ApJ Letters

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Cited by in corpus (14)

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• Observability of Forming Planets and their Circumplanetary Disks II. -- SEDs and Near-Infrared Fluxes
• Limits on Millimeter Continuum Emission from Circumplanetary Material in the DSHARP Disks
• ALMA 1.3 Millimeter Map of the HD 95086 System
• An Explanation of the Very Low Radio Flux of Young Planet-mass Companions
• The Endgame of Gas Giant Formation: Accretion Luminosity and Contraction Post-Runaway
• Self-consistent modelling of the dust component in protoplanetary and circumplanetary disks: the case of PDS 70
• A search for companions via direct imaging in the DSHARP planet-forming disks
• Constraints on PDS 70 b and c from the dust continuum emission of the circumplanetary discs considering in situ dust evolution
• Observability of Forming Planets and their Circumplanetary Disks IV. -- with JWST & ELT
• Imaging protoplanets: observing transition disks with non-redundant masking
• An optimised survey strategy for the ERIS/NIX imager: searching for young giant exoplanets and very low mass brown dwarfs using the K-peak custom photometric filter
• Searching for Protoplanets around MWC 758 and MWC 480 in Br-$\gamma$ using Kernel Phase and SCExAO/CHARIS