Spiral formation caused by late infall onto protoplanetary disks

Abstract

The classical picture that planet formation occurs in protoplanetary disks that are isolated from their environment is undergoing a major shift toward a more connected picture. An increasing amount of evolved disks are found to be actively interacting with their environment, often showing various types of spiral structures. In this work, we aim to investigate if these spirals can be a direct result of ongoing late infall using the grid-based 3D hydrodynamics code FARGO3D. We perform a detailed analysis of the spiral properties and appearance in scattered light and CO line emission using the radiative transfer code RADMC3D. In scattered light, we find both well-defined spirals with few arms (m=2) and more flocculent structures: The gradual accretion of gas remnants after a major accretion event has the most success in the former, whereas active accretion via streamers favors the latter. The m=2 spirals we find have a very low pattern speed, making them easily discernible from spirals caused by a perturber. We also find spiral patterns in the ${}^{12}$CO residual motions, but their morphology does not match the one found in scattered light. The disk perturbations are strongest in the upper layers (z>4H), which is reflected by the reduced amplitude of the residual motions in the more optically thin ${}^{13}$CO emission. Moreover, we find that the formation of m=2 spirals is not promoted in disks with lower mass, despite being more susceptible to deeper kinematic perturbations. While the late-infall streamers impact planet formation directly through the delivery of fresh material, we show that the midplane remains unperturbed unless the infalling mass is of the same order of magnitude as the disk mass. Planet formation can therefore only be impacted by late infall through secondary mechanisms that lead to dust trapping or the generation of turbulence starting from surface-level perturbations.

arXiv comment15 pages, 13 figures. Accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics

References in corpus (44)

• Streaming Instabilities in Protoplanetary Disks
• Particle Stirring in Turbulent Gas Disks: Including Orbital Oscillations
• Herschel view of the Taurus B211/3 filament and striations: Evidence of filamentary growth?
• Consistent dust and gas models for protoplanetary disks. I. Disk shape, dust settling, opacities, and PAHs
• Asymmetric features in the protoplanetary disk MWC758
• Local Magnetohydrodynamical Models of Layered Accretion Disks
• FARGO3D: A new GPU-oriented MHD code
• The relation between gas and dust in the Taurus Molecular Cloud
• Shadows cast by a warp in the HD 142527 protoplanetary disk
• Spiral Arms in the Asymmetrically Illuminated Disk of MWC 758 and Constraints on Giant Planets
• Why do protoplanetary disks appear not massive enough to form the known exoplanet population?
• The Eccentric Cavity, Triple Rings, Two-Armed Spirals, and Double Clumps of the MWC 758 Disk
• Wave-like warp propagation in circumbinary discs I. Analytic theory and numerical simulations
• Contemporary formation of early solar system planetesimals at two distinct radial locations
• Signatures of broken protoplanetary discs in scattered light and in sub-millimetre observations
• Disk Evolution Study Through Imaging of Nearby Young Stars (DESTINYS): Late infall causing disk misalignment and dynamic structures in SU Aur
• Discovery of a point-like source and a third spiral arm in the transition disk around the Herbig Ae star MWC 758
• ALMA chemical survey of disk-outflow sources in Taurus (ALMA-DOT) VI: Accretion shocks in the disk of DG Tau and HL Tau
• Inclined Massive Planets in a Protoplanetary Disc: Gap Opening, Disc Breaking, and Observational Signatures
• Anisotropic Infall and Substructure formation in Embedded Disks
• Cloudlet capture by Transitional Disk and FU Orionis stars
• Misaligned disks induced by infall
• Are Inner Disc Misalignments Common? ALMA Reveals an Isotropic Outer Disc Inclination Distribution for Young Dipper Stars
• Rossby Wave Instability in three dimensional discs
• The Disc Miner I: A statistical framework to detect and quantify kinematical perturbations driven by young planets in discs
• Are protoplanetary disks born with vortices? -- Rossby wave instability driven by protostellar infall
• Modeling accretion shocks at the disk-envelope interface -- Sulfur chemistry
• Gravitational instability in a planet-forming disk
• Thermal Infrared Imaging of MWC 758 with the Large Binocular Telescope: Planetary Driven Spiral Arms?
• Protoplanetary disks in $K_s$-band total intensity and polarized light
• Spiral-driven accretion in protoplanetary discs - III tri-dimensional simulations
• Spiral Arm Pattern Motion in the SAO 206462 Protoplanetary Disk
• On the equations of warped disc dynamics
• Probing the eccentricity in protostellar discs -- Modeling kinematics and morphologies
• Investigating point sources in MWC 758 with SPHERE
• Asymmetric Temperature Variations In Protoplanetary disks: I. Linear Theory, Corotating Spirals, and Ring Formation
• There is no disk mass budget problem of planet formation
• Can gap-edge illumination excite spirals in protoplanetary disks? Three-temperature radiation hydrodynamics and NIR image modelling
• Planetesimal formation via the streaming instability in simulations of infall dominated young disks
• Asymmetric Signatures of Warps in Edge-on Disks
• Late accretion offers pathway to misaligned disk around the planet-hosting IRAS 04125+2902
• Emergence of streamers in simulations of late infall
• Instability and vertical eccentricity variation in global hydrodynamic disk simulations
• Warps survive beyond fly-by encounters in protoplanetary disks. RW Aur A as a case study