Determining protoplanetary disk gas masses from CO isotopologues line observations

TL;DR

This study develops a method using CO isotopologue line observations, accounting for isotope-selective effects, to estimate protoplanetary disk gas masses with improved accuracy, leveraging ALMA data and detailed modeling.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive physical-chemical model including isotope-selective photodissociation to accurately infer disk masses from CO isotopologue lines.

Findings

Total fluxes can estimate disk mass with uncertainties.

Spatially resolved data reduces estimation errors.

Line intensities vary with disk and stellar parameters.

Abstract

Despite intensive studies of protoplanetary disks, there is still no reliable way to determine their total mass and their surface density distribution, quantities that are crucial for describing both the structure and the evolution of disks up to the formation of planets. The goal of this work is to use less abundant CO isotopologues, whose detection is routine for ALMA, to infer the gas mass of disks. Isotope-selective effects need to be taken into account in the analysis, because they can significantly modify CO isotopologues line intensities. CO isotope-selective photodissociation has been implemented in the physical-chemical code DALI and 800 disk models have been run for a range of disk and stellar parameters. Dust and gas temperature structures have been computed self-consistently, together with a chemical calculation of the main species. Both disk structure and stellar parameters have been investigated. Total fluxes have been ray-traced for different CO isotopologues and for various transitions for different inclinations. A combination of 13CO and C18O total intensities allows inference of the total disk mass, although with non-negligible uncertainties. These can be overcome by employing spatially resolved observations, i.e. the disk's radial extent and inclination. Comparison with parametric models shows differences at the factor of a few level, especially for extremely low and high disk masses. Finally, total line intensities for different CO isotopologue and for various low-J transitions are provided and are fitted to simple formulae. The effects of a lower gas-phase carbon abundance and different gas/dust ratios are investigated as well, and comparison with other tracers is made. Disk masses can be determined within a factor of a few by comparing CO isotopologue lines observations with the simulated line fluxes, modulo the uncertainties in the volatile elemental abundances.