Identifying Anticyclonic Vortex Features Produced by the Rossby Wave Instability in Protoplanetary Disks

TL;DR

This study explores the detectability of anticyclonic vortices caused by Rossby wave instability in protoplanetary disks using ALMA, combining simulations and radiative transfer to guide observational strategies.

Contribution

It demonstrates how to identify and analyze vortex features in disks through synthetic observations, advancing methods for studying planet formation environments.

Findings

Anticyclonic vortices produce weak but detectable gas velocity signatures.

Proper observational setup enhances vortex detection probability.

Provides a methodology to infer vortex kinematic properties from ALMA data.

Abstract

Several nearby protoplanetary disks have been observed to display large scale crescents in the (sub)millimeter dust continuum emission. One interpretation is that these structures correspond to anticyclonic vortices generated by the Rossby wave instability within the gaseous disk. Such vortices have local gas over-densities and are expected to concentrate dust particles with Stokes number around unity. This process might catalyze the formation of planetesimals. Whereas recent observations showed that dust crescent are indeed regions where millimeter-size particles have abnormally high concentration relative to the gas and smaller grains, no observations have yet shown that the gas within the crescent region counter-rotates with respect to the protoplanetary disk. Here we investigate the detectability of anticyclonic features through measurement of the line-of-sight component of the gas velocity obtained with ALMA. We carry out 2D hydrodynamic simulations and 3D radiative transfer calculation of a protoplanetary disk characterized by a vortex created by the tidal interaction with a massive planet. As a case study, the disk parameters are chosen to mimic the IRS 48 system, which has the most prominent crescent observed to date. We generate synthetic ALMA observations of both the dust continuum and 12CO emission around the frequency of 345 GHz. We find that the anticyclonic features of vortex are weak but can be detected if both the source and the observational setup are properly chosen. We provide a recipe for maximizing the probability to detect such vortex features and present an analysis procedure to infer their kinematic properties.