Giant Planets Carving Paths around Four Young Stars, ALMA Observations Suggest

Certain disks, called transitional disks, have a surprising absence of dust at their centers, in the region around the star. Two main ideas have been put forward to explain these mysterious cavities. First, the strong stellar winds and intense radiation from the star could have blown away or simply destroyed the encircling gas and dust. Alternatively, massive young planets in the process of formation could have cleared the material as they orbit the star. Previous observations lacked the sensitivity and resolution to determine the most likely explanation.

With ALMA, however, the team of astronomers, led by Nienke van der Marel of Leiden Observatory, the Netherlands, was able to map the distribution of gas and dust in four of these transitional disks better than ever before.

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have found telltale differences between the gaps in the gas and the dust in disks around four young stars. These new observations are the clearest indications yet that planets with masses several times that of Jupiter have recently formed in these disks. This schematic diagram shows how the dust (brown) and gas (blue) is distributed around the star, and how a young planet is clearing the central gap. 

The new ALMA images confirm that the dust-free zones of these disks are not empty, but instead contain significant amounts of gas. These gas-filled regions, the researchers discovered, also contain cavities that are up to three times smaller than the gaps observed in the dust. Such structures are best explained by the scenario in which newly formed massive planets have cleared the gas as they traveled around their orbits.

“Previous observations already hinted at the presence of gas inside the dust cavities,” explains Nienke van der Marel. “But as ALMA can image the material in the entire disk with much greater sharpness and depth than other facilities, we could rule out the alternative scenario. The deep gap points clearly to the presence of planets with several times the mass of Jupiter, creating these caverns as they sweep through the disk.”

Remarkably, these observations were conducted utilizing just one tenth of the current resolving power of ALMA, as they were performed while half of the array was still under construction on Chajnantor Plateau in northern Chile.