On the underestimation of dust mass in protoplanetary disks: Effects of disk structure and dust properties

TL;DR

This study shows that traditional methods often significantly underestimate dust mass in protoplanetary disks due to optical depth effects, and radiative transfer modeling provides more accurate estimates crucial for understanding planet formation.

Contribution

The paper systematically investigates how disk structure and dust properties affect dust mass estimates, highlighting the limitations of analytic methods and demonstrating the effectiveness of radiative transfer modeling.

Findings

Analytic methods can underestimate dust mass by factors of a few to hundreds.

Radiative transfer modeling yields higher, more accurate dust mass estimates.

Disk substructures influence the degree of mass underestimation.

Abstract

The total amount of dust grains in protoplanetary disks is one of the key properties that characterize the potential for planet formation. With (sub-)millimeter flux measurements, literature studies usually derive the dust mass using an analytic form under the assumption of optically thin emission, which may lead to substantial underestimation. In this work, we conduct a parameter study with the goal of investigating the effects of disk structure and dust properties on the underestimation through self-consistent radiative transfer models. Different dust models, scattering modes and approaches for dust settling are considered and compared. The influences of disk substructures, such as rings and crescents, on the mass derivation are investigated as well. The results indicate that the traditional analytic method can underestimate the mass by a factor of a few to hundreds, depending on the optical depth along the line of sight set mainly by the true dust mass, disk size and inclination. As an application, we perform a detailed radiative transfer modeling of the spectral energy distribution of DoAr 33, one of the observed DSHARP disks. When the DSHARP dust opacities are adopted, the most probable dust mass returned from the Bayesian analysis is roughly 7 times higher than the value given by the analytic calculation. Our study demonstrates that estimating disk dust masses from radiative transfer modeling is one solution for alleviating the problem of insufficient mass for planet formation raised in the ALMA era.