Robinson, A., Owen, J.E. and Booth, R.A. orcid.org/0000-0002-0364-937X (2025) The effect of radiation pressure on the dispersal of photoevaporating discs. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 536 (2). pp. 1689-1709. ISSN 0035-8711
Abstract
Observed infrared (IR) excesses indicate that protoplanetary discs evolve slowly for the majority of their lifetime before losing their near- and mid-IR excesses on short time-scales. Photoevaporation models can explain this ‘two-time-scale’ nature of disc evolution through the removal of inner regions of discs after a few million years. However, they also predict the existence of a population of non-accreting discs with large cavities. Such discs are scarce within the observed population, suggesting the models are incomplete. We explore whether radiation-pressure-driven outflows are able to remove enough dust to fit observations. We simulate these outflows using CUDISC, including dust dynamics, growth/fragmentation, radiative transfer and a parametrization of internal photoevaporation. We find that, in most cases, dust mass-loss rates are around 5–10 times too small to meet observational constraints. Particles are launched from the disc inner rim, however grains larger than around a micron do not escape in the outflow, meaning mass-loss rates are too low for the initial dust masses at gap-opening. Only systems that have smooth photoevaporation profiles with gas mass-loss rates >∼5 × 10−9M yr−1 and disc dust masses <∼1 M⊕ at the time of gap opening can meet observational constraints; in the current models these manifest as EUV winds driven by atypically large high-energy photon fluxes. We also find that the height of the disc’s photosphere is controlled by small grains in the outflow as opposed to shadowing from a hot inner rim; the effect of this can be seen in synthetic scattered light observations.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2024 The Author(s). This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | protoplanetary discs, circumstellar matter, stars: pre-main-sequence |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences (Leeds) > School of Physics and Astronomy (Leeds) > Astrophysics (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 16 Jan 2025 13:04 |
Last Modified: | 16 Jan 2025 13:04 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Oxford University Press |
Identification Number: | 10.1093/mnras/stae2702 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:221883 |