The ALMA Survey of Gas Evolution of PROtoplanetary Disks (AGE-PRO): VIII. The impact of external photoevaporation on disk masses and radii in Upper Scorpius

TL;DR

This study investigates how external UV radiation from nearby massive stars influences the evolution, sizes, and masses of protoplanetary disks in Upper Scorpius, highlighting the importance of environmental effects in disk evolution models.

Contribution

It demonstrates that including external photoevaporation effects in models better explains observed disk properties in Upper Scorpius compared to pure viscous evolution.

Findings

External photoevaporation significantly reduces disk sizes and moderately decreases masses.

Models including external photoevaporation match observed disk sizes for most sources.

Environmental irradiation must be considered when comparing star-forming regions.

Abstract

Protoplanetary disk evolution can be deeply influenced by the UV radiation emitted by neighboring massive stars (mainly of spectral type O and B). We show that the process of external photoevaporation, which causes an outside-in depletion of disk material due to environmental UV radiation, can lead to a significant decrease in disk size, and moderate in disk mass and lifetime even at moderate irradiation levels (1-10 G$_{0}$). In this work we investigate the role of external photoevaporation in shaping the masses and sizes of the ten AGE-PRO disks in the Upper Scorpius region, which we estimate to be subject to FUV fluxes ranging between 2 and 12 G$_{0}$, on average. We compare the disk masses and sizes resulting from 1D numerical viscous evolution simulations in which the effect of external photoevaporation is included, to the values retrieved from the AGE-PRO observations. While the pure viscous framework fails in adequately explaining the observed disk properties in Upper Scorpius, with the inclusion of external photoevaporation we can successfully reproduce gas disk sizes for 7 out of 10 sources within a factor <2, when the initial disk mass is 1-10% of the stellar mass. We emphasize the importance of accounting for the environmental irradiation when comparing star-forming regions of different ages, even when moderate FUV irradiation fields are experienced, as in the case of Upper Scorpius.