The influence of dust growth on the observational properties of circumplanetary discs

TL;DR

This study models the spectral effects of dust growth in circumplanetary discs, showing that millimeter-sized particles produce broad, featureless spectra and that the 30-500 micron range is optimal for observing these features.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed modeling linking dust size distributions to spectral features in circumplanetary discs, highlighting the importance of dust growth in interpreting observations.

Findings

Millimeter-sized dust results in broad, featureless spectra.

Spectral features are prominent in the 30-500 micron range.

Dust growth from microns to millimeters can explain observed spectra of PDS 70c.

Abstract

Dust growth is often indirectly inferred observationally in star-forming environments, theoretically predicted to produce mm-sized particles in circumstellar discs, and also presumably witnessed by the predecessors of the terrestrial meteoritic record. For those reasons it is believed that young gas giants under formation in protoplanetary discs with putative circumplanetary discs (CPDs) surrounding them, such as PDS 70c, should be containing mm-sized particles. We model the spectra of a set of CPDs, which we obtained from radiation hydrodynamic simulations at varying Rosseland opacities kappa_R. The kappa_R from the hydrodynamic simulations are matched with consistent opacity sets of ISM-like composition, but grown to larger sizes. Our high kappa_R hydro data nominally corresponds to 10 mum-sized particles, and our low kappa_R-cases correspond to mm-sized particles. We investigate the resulting broad spectral features at first while keeping the overall optical depth in the planetary envelope constant. Dust growth to size distributions dominated by millimeter particles generally results in broad, featureless spectra with black-body like slopes in the far-infrared, while size distributions dominated by small dust develop steeper slopes in the far-infrared and maintain some features stemming from individual minerals. We find that significant dust growth from microns to millimeters can explain the broad features of the PDS 70c data, when upscaling the dust masses from our simulations by x100. Furthermore our results indicate that the spectral range of 30-500 mum is an ideal hunting ground for broadband features arising from the CPD, but that longer wavelengths observed with ALMA can also be used for massive circumplanetary discs