Revealing asymmetry on midplane of proto-planetary disc through modelling of axisymmetric emission: methodology

TL;DR

This paper introduces an analytical method for modeling the surface brightness and geometry of axisymmetric protoplanetary discs from interferometric data, improving the detection of faint non-axisymmetric features like spirals and circumplanetary discs.

Contribution

The study presents a novel analytical framework that accurately recovers axisymmetric structures and identifies non-axisymmetric features in protoplanetary discs from observational data.

Findings

Successfully recovered injected axisymmetric structures in simulated data.

Improved disc orientation estimation over Gaussian fitting.

Detected known and new substructures in real disc observations.

Abstract

This study proposes an analytical framework for deriving the surface brightness profile and geometry of a geometrically-thin axisymmetric disc from interferometric observation of continuum emission. Such precise modelling facilitates the exploration of faint non-axisymmetric structures, such as spirals and circumplanetary discs. As a demonstration, we simulate interferometric observations of geometrically-thin axisymmetric discs. The proposed method can reasonably recover the injected axisymmetric structures, whereas Gaussian fitting of the same data yielded larger errors in disc orientation estimation. To further test the applicability of the method, it was applied to the mock data for $m=1,2$ spirals and a point source, which are embedded in a bright axisymmetric structure. The injected non-axisymmetric structures were reasonably recovered except for the innermost parts, and the disc geometric parameter estimations were better than Gasussian fitting. The method was then applied to the real data of Elias 20 and AS 209, and it adequately subtracted the axisymmetric component, notably in Elias 20, where substantial residuals remained without our method. We also applied our method to continuum data of PDS 70 to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method. We successfully recovered emission from PDS 70 c consistently with previous studies, and also tentatively discovered new substructures. The current formulation can be applied to any data for disc continuum emission, and aids in the search of spirals and circumplanetary discs, whose detection is still limited.