Large Myr-old Disks are Not Severely Depleted of gas-phase CO or carbon

TL;DR

This study uses [CI] emission observations to show that large, million-year-old T Tauri disks generally retain their gas and carbon content, challenging previous assumptions of significant depletion.

Contribution

It provides new detections of [CI] in T Tauri disks and compares these observations with thermo-chemical models, demonstrating disks are not severely depleted of gas or carbon.

Findings

[CI] detected in 6 out of 10 large T Tauri disks

[CI] flux correlates with CO isotopologue fluxes and disk size

Models reproduce observed line luminosities with standard ISM abundances

Abstract

We present an ACA search for [CI] emission at 492GHz toward large T Tauri disks (gas radii $\gtrsim 200$au) in the $\sim 1-3$Myr-old Lupus star-forming region. Combined with ALMA 12-m archival data for IM Lup, we report [CI] detections in 6 out of 10 sources, thus doubling the known detections toward T Tauri disks. We also identify four Keplerian double-peaked profiles and demonstrate that [CI] fluxes correlate with $^{13}$CO, C$^{18}$O, and $^{12}$CO(2-1) fluxes, as well as with the gas disk outer radius measured from the latter transition. These findings are in line with the expectation that atomic carbon traces the disk surface. In addition, we compare the carbon and CO line luminosities of the Lupus and literature sample with [CI] detections with predictions from the self-consistent disk thermo-chemical models of Ruaud et al. (2022). These models adopt ISM carbon and oxygen elemental abundances as input parameters. With the exception of the disk around Sz 98, we find that these models reproduce all available line luminosities and upper limits with gas masses comparable to or higher than the minimum mass solar nebula and gas-to-dust mass ratios $\geq 10$. Thus, we conclude that the majority of large Myr-old disks conform to the simple expectation that they are not significantly depleted in gas, CO, or carbon.