Periodic Reporting for period 1 - UNVEIL (Unveiling the infancy of planetary systems)
Berichtszeitraum: 2023-02-01 bis 2025-07-31
Observational campaigns are revealing thousand of exoplanets, showcasing that planet formation is an extremely efficient mechanism around most stars during their infancy. The same observations also indicate that exoplanets exhibit a wide diversity in their properties, such as radius, mass, orbital separations, and chemistry of their atmospheres. The natal environments of these planets are disks of gas and dust orbiting new-born stars, and they are called protoplanetary disks. Highly detailed images of these disks show potential signatures of dynamical interactions of growing planets within their structure, but at the moment only very few planets have been detected while they are still accreting mass in their protoplanetary disk! Thanks to the revolutionary capabilities of recent and new facilities observing the sky at different wavelengths, such as ALMA in the Atacama desert, and JWST from space, the time is ripe to finally detect more planets in the act of formation. This is fundamental to observe directly how their bulk and atmospheric properties is determined by the physics and chemistry of their birth surroundings. The ERC project UNVEIL will bridge the gap between exoplanets and planet forming disks by directly observing and modelling the assembly of massive planets in disks at large orbital radii. By leveraging extremely deep new data, the aims of the project are multi-faceted. First, we will observationally characterize how the gas motions (dynamics) can support the formation of planetary cores, the seeds of massive planets. Second, we will search for these massive planets with two distinct methodologies: (a) we will look for feeble waves propagating in the protoplanetary disk, which originate from the growing protoplanets, to unveil their presence; (b) we will try to image these protoplanets themselves in the infrared, which is the most prominent color of their emission light. Finally, we will directly connect the chemistry of protoplanetary disks with the chemistry of these growing protoplanets, by using special techniques to extract this information. This project builds upon a novel methodology to detect protoplanets in the wave pattern of protoplanetary disks, and upon novel datasets that we recently obtained from both ALMA and JWST. In summary, this ERC project will provide observational constraints that are sorely needed to unveil the formation phases of cores and atmospheres of exoplanets that are similar to Jupiter and Saturn in our own Solar System.
During the first 24 months of the project, we started several projects that have already yielded important achievements:
- we assessed how accurately we can derive protoplanetary disk masses from their rotation curves, while accounting for their complex thermal structure;
- we verified that for a small sample of disks where our methodologies were applicable, pressure modulations are a robust explanation to the dust structures seen in planet forming disks;
- we characterised the physico-chemical structure of the only known planet-hosting disk, PDS 70, with high angular resolution line observations;
- we detected and spatially resolved water vapour in the archetypal disk HL Tau, providing the first image of water gas in the planet forming regions of a quiescent disk;
- we are developing new tools to pin-point the location of embedded protoplanets in the dynamical structure of protoplanetary disks;
- we obtained several follow-up observations of our disk kinematics sample with ALMA, JWST and VLT, ensuring the needed datasets to complement our findings with different instruments.
- we assessed how accurately we can derive protoplanetary disk masses from their rotation curves, while accounting for their complex thermal structure;
- we verified that for a small sample of disks where our methodologies were applicable, pressure modulations are a robust explanation to the dust structures seen in planet forming disks;
- we characterised the physico-chemical structure of the only known planet-hosting disk, PDS 70, with high angular resolution line observations;
- we detected and spatially resolved water vapour in the archetypal disk HL Tau, providing the first image of water gas in the planet forming regions of a quiescent disk;
- we are developing new tools to pin-point the location of embedded protoplanets in the dynamical structure of protoplanetary disks;
- we obtained several follow-up observations of our disk kinematics sample with ALMA, JWST and VLT, ensuring the needed datasets to complement our findings with different instruments.
Some of our findings are pushing the field beyond what has been accomplished hitherto. In particular, our kinematical studies are providing spectacular images of the dynamical environments in which planets form, possibly revealing their very presence in how they perturb their natal disks. Such detailed characterisation of the physico-chemical scenario in which planets form will certainly have a significant impact in the research community and beyond. At the same time, a characterisation of the spatial distribution of water vapour in disks exhibiting complex structures in their dust component will be highly interesting for the general public, possibly linking with new observations how water is not only important for the emergence of life, but also for the formation of planetary seeds.