The dispersal of compact protoplanetary discs
Giovanni Picogna, Barbara Ercolano

TL;DR
This study investigates how the outer radius of compact protoplanetary discs influences their dispersal via internal photoevaporation, providing a scaling relation that aligns models with observed inside-out clearing patterns.
Contribution
It introduces a simple scaling relation for photoevaporation effects based on disc outer radius, improving the accuracy of disc evolution models.
Findings
Surface mass-loss profiles are nearly independent of disc size.
Integrated wind rates decrease with smaller outer radii.
Including the cut-off radius in models reproduces inside-out dispersal.
Abstract
Compact protoplanetary discs are becoming increasingly prominent in observations. Their dispersal pathways may differ substantially from those of extended discs. We aim to quantify the role of the disc outer radius in internal photoevaporation, provide a simple scaling relation for compact discs, and test whether the resulting evolutionary tracks reproduce the observed inside-out clearing of young stellar populations. We performed radiation-hydrodynamic simulations of X-ray-driven photoevaporation for discs with different outer radii, and derived the dependence of the total mass-loss rate on the cut-off radius. We find that the surface mass-loss profiles are nearly independent of disc size, but their integrated wind rates are reduced according to the cumulative mass-loss rate distribution. We incorporated this scaling into disc population synthesis models. When the internal…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
