External Photoevaporation of Protoplanetary Disks: Does Location Matter?

Many theoretical studies have shown that external photoevaporation from massive stars can severely truncate, or destroy altogether, the gaseous protoplanetary disks around young stars. In tandem, several observational studies report a correlation between the mass of a protoplanetary disk and its distance to massive ionizing stars in star-forming regions, and cite external photoevaporation by the massive stars as the origin of this correlation. We present N-body simulations of the dynamical evolution of star-forming regions and determine the mass loss in protoplanetary disks from external photoevaporation due to far-ultraviolet and extreme-ultraviolet radiation from massive stars. We find that projection effects can be significant, in that low-mass disk-hosting stars that appear close to the ionizing sources may be fore- or background stars in the star-forming region. We find very little evidence in our simulations for a trend in increasing disk mass with increasing distance from the massive star(s), even when projection effects are ignored. Furthermore, the dynamical evolution of these young star-forming regions moves stars whose disks have been photoevaporated to far-flung locations, away from the ionizing stars, and we suggest that any correlation between disk mass and distance from the ionizing star is either coincidental, or due to some process other than external photoevaporation.