The spectral energy distribution of protoplanetary diss around Massive Young Stellar Objects

TL;DR

This study models the spectral energy distribution of protoplanetary disks around Massive Young Stellar Objects, emphasizing the importance of including both gas and dust phases for accurate interpretation of observations.

Contribution

It introduces detailed radiative transfer calculations that simultaneously account for gaseous and dusty components, improving the understanding of their combined effects on observed spectra.

Findings

Models including both gas and dust are essential for accurate SED interpretation.

Omitting gas leads to overestimated far-infrared and sub-millimeter fluxes.

Free-free emission from ionized gas affects the slope of dust emission in sub-mm and mm wavelengths.

Abstract

We investigate the effect of ionising radiation from Massive Young Stellar Objects impinging on their emerging spectral energy distribution. By means of detailed radiative transfer calculations including both the gaseous and dust phase of their surrounding protoplanetary discs we highlight the importance of modelling both phases simultaneously when interpreting observations from such objects. In particular we find that models that only include dust may lead to incorrect conclusions about the inner disc evolution. Furthermore the omission of gas from models overproduces far-infrared and sub-millimiter fluxes with the result that derived dust masses may be underestimated by a factor of two in some cases. Finally free-free emission from the ionised component of gaseous discs causes the slope of the dust emission in the sub-mm and mm regime to appear flatter, resulting in incorrectly modelling the dust properties, with consequences on the derived disc masses, power law index of the surface density profile and other disc properties.