The survivorship bias of protoplanetary disc populations

TL;DR

This paper investigates how survivorship bias affects the observed mass distribution of protoplanetary discs, proposing median mass evolution as a new indicator to distinguish between different disc dispersal models.

Contribution

It introduces the use of median disc mass evolution as a novel method to identify the dominant disc dispersal mechanism in observed populations.

Findings

Rapid disc dispersal causes an apparent increase in median mass.

Median mass evolution differs between photoevaporative and MHD wind-driven models.

Analytical relations and simulations confirm the proposed criteria.

Abstract

The evolution of protoplanetary discs has a substantial impact on theories of planet formation. To date, neither of the two main competing evolutionary models, namely the viscous-photoevaporative paradigm and the MHD winds model, has been ruled out by observations. Due to the high number of sources observed by large surveys, population synthesis is a powerful tool to distinguish the evolution mechanism in observations. We explore the evolution of the mass distribution of synthetic populations under the assumptions of turbulence-driven accretion and dispersal caused by internal photoevaporation. We find that the rapid removal of light discs often results in an apparent increase of the median mass of the survived disc population. This occurs both when the disc properties are independent of each other, and when typical correlations between these quantities and the stellar mass are assumed. Furthermore, as MHD wind-driven accretion rarely manifests the same feature, this serves as a signature of the viscous-photoevaporative evolution when dispersal proceeds from inside-out. Therefore, we propose the evolution of the median mass as a new method to distinguish this model in observed populations. This survivorship bias is not shown by the median accretion rate, which, instead, decreases with time. Moreover, we introduce a new criterion that estimates the disc lifetime as a function of initial conditions and an analytical relation to predict whether internal photoevaporation triggers an inside-out or an outside-in dispersal. We verify both analytical relations with numerical simulations.