An Upper Limit on the Mass of the Circumplanetary Disk for DH Tau b

• Published in: The Astronomical journal 2017-07, Vol.154 (1), p.26
• Main Authors: Wolff, Schuyler G., Ménard, François, Caceres, Claudio, Lefèvre, Charlene, Bonnefoy, Mickael, Cánovas, Héctor, Maret, Sébastien, Pinte, Christophe, Schreiber, Matthias R., Plas, Gerrit van der
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: ASTROPHYSICS, COSMOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY; CLOUDS; COSMIC DUST; EMISSION; EQUILIBRIUM; HEATING; ILLUMINANCE; MASS; PLANETS; RADIANT HEAT TRANSFER; STARS
• ISSN: 0004-6256; 1538-3881; 1538-3881
• DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/aa74cd

DH Tau is a young (∼1 Myr) classical T Tauri star. It is one of the few young PMS stars known to be associated with a planetary mass companion, DH Tau b, orbiting at large separation and detected by direct imaging. DH Tau b is thought to be accreting based on copious emission and exhibits variable Paschen Beta emission. NOEMA observations at 230 GHz allow us to place constraints on the disk dust mass for both DH Tau b and the primary in a regime where the disks will appear optically thin. We estimate a disk dust mass for the primary, DH Tau A of , which gives a disk to star mass ratio of 0.014 (assuming the usual gas to dust mass ratio of 100 in the disk). We find a conservative disk dust mass upper limit of 0.42 M ⊕ for DH Tau b, assuming that the disk temperature is dominated by irradiation from DH Tau b itself. Given the environment of the circumplanetary disk, variable illumination from the primary or the equilibrium temperature of the surrounding cloud would lead to even lower disk mass estimates. A MCFOST radiative transfer model, including heating of the circumplanetary disk by DH Tau b and DH Tau A, suggests that a mass-averaged disk temperature of 22 K is more realistic, resulting in a dust disk mass upper limit of 0.09 M ⊕ for DH Tau b. We place DH Tau b in context with similar objects and discuss the consequences for planet formation models.