Protoplanetary disk lifetimes vs stellar mass and possible implications for giant planet populations

TL;DR

This study investigates how the evolution of protoplanetary disks varies with stellar mass, revealing that disks around higher-mass stars evolve faster, which impacts theories of giant planet formation and migration.

Contribution

It provides the first statistically significant evidence that protoplanetary disk evolution depends on stellar mass, especially around stars greater than 2 solar masses.

Findings

Disks evolve faster around stars > 2 M$_{ ext{sun}}$.

Evolved disk levels are consistent across ages and masses.

Implications for giant planet formation and hot Jupiter scarcity.

Abstract

We study the dependence of protoplanetary disk evolution on stellar mass using a large sample of young stellar objects in nearby young star-forming regions. We update the protoplanetary disk fractions presented in our recent work (paper I of this series) derived for 22 nearby (< 500 pc) associations between 1 and 100 Myr. We use a subsample of 1 428 spectroscopically confirmed members to study the impact of stellar mass on protoplanetary disk evolution. We divide this sample into two stellar mass bins (2 M$_{\odot}$ boundary) and two age bins (3 Myr boundary), and use infrared excesses over the photospheric emission to classify objects in three groups: protoplanetary disks, evolved disks, and diskless. The homogeneous analysis and bias corrections allow for a statistically significant inter-comparison of the obtained results. We find robust statistical evidence of disk evolution dependence with stellar mass. Our results, combined with previous studies on disk evolution, confirm that protoplanetary disks evolve faster and/or earlier around high-mass (> 2 M$_{\odot}$) stars. We also find a roughly constant level of evolved disks throughout the whole age and stellar mass spectra. We conclude that protoplanetary disk evolution depends on stellar mass. Such a dependence could have important implications for gas giant planet formation and migration, and could contribute to explaining the apparent paucity of hot Jupiters around high-mass stars.