Gravitational instability, spiral substructure, and modest grain growth in a typical protostellar disk: Modeling multi-wavelength dust continuum observation of TMC1A

TL;DR

This study models multi-wavelength dust continuum observations of the TMC1A protostellar disk, revealing gravitational instability, spiral substructure, and modest grain growth, providing insights into early disk properties relevant for planet formation.

Contribution

It introduces a gravitationally self-regulated disk model that fits observations and predicts spiral structure and grain size, advancing understanding of early protostellar disks.

Findings

Disk is gravitationally unstable and self-regulated

Spiral structure's pitch angle matches model predictions

Grain growth is limited by fragmentation barrier

Abstract

Embedded, Class 0/I protostellar disks represent the initial condition for planet formation. This calls for better understandings of their bulk properties and the dust grains within them. We model multi-wavelength dust continuum observations of the disk surrounding the Class I protostar TMC1A to provide insight on these properties. The observations can be well fit by a gravitationally self-regulated (i.e., marginally gravitationally unstable and internally heated) disk model, with surface density $\Sigma \sim 1720 (R/10au)^{-1.96} g/cm^2$ and midplane temperature $T_{mid} \sim 185 (R/10au)^{-1.27} K$. The observed disk contains a $m=1$ spiral substructure; we use our model to predict the spiral's pitch angle and the prediction is consistent with the observations. This agreement serves as both a test of our model and strong evidence of the gravitational nature of the spiral. Our model estimates a maximum grain size $a_{max}\sim 196(R/10au)^{-2.45} \mu m$, which is consistent with grain growth being capped by a fragmentation barrier with threshold velocity $\sim 1 m/s$. We further demonstrate that observational properties of TMC1A are typical among the observed population of Class 0/I disks, which hints that traditional methods of disk data analyses based on Gaussian fitting and the assumption of the optically thin dust emission could have systematically underestimated disk size and mass and overestimated grain size.