Gap-opening Planets Make Dust Rings Wider

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that gap-opening planets can significantly widen dust rings in protoplanetary disks, with implications for interpreting disk substructures observed in high-resolution surveys.

Contribution

The paper introduces a 3D simulation-based analysis showing how gap-opening planets influence dust ring widths, providing a quantitative criterion for ring widening.

Findings

Planet-induced perturbations can widen dust rings even with high dust-to-gas ratios.

The widening effect can be modeled using diffusion-advection theory.

Ring width estimates can be derived from gas turbulent viscosity, considering the Schmidt number.

Abstract

As one of the most commonly observed disk substructures, dust rings from high-resolution disk surveys appear to have different radial widths. Recent observations on PDS 70 and AB Aur reveal not only planets in the disk, but also the accompanying wide dust rings. We use three-dimensional dust-and-gas disk simulations to study whether gap-opening planets are responsible for the large ring width in disk observations. We find that gap-opening planets can widen rings of dust trapped at the pressure bump via planetary perturbations, even with the mid-plane dust-to-gas ratio approaching order unity and with the dust back-reaction accounted for. We show that the planet-related widening effect of dust rings can be quantified using diffusion-advection theory, and provide a generalized criterion for an equilibrated dust ring width in three-dimensional disk models. We also suggest that the ring width can be estimated using the gas turbulent viscosity $\alpha_{\rm turb}$, but with cautions about the Schmidt number greater than order unity.