Get out of the view: explaining light curves of dipping young stars as the effect of a misaligned inner disk

Stefano Facchini & Carlo Manara

(email advisors)

Protoplanetary disks, the birthplace of planets, are highly dynamic objects. Here we aim at explaining peculiar time variability in the brightness of young stars as due to a misaligned inner disk.

The last years have witnessed a revolution in the field of planet formation. Resolved images of planet forming disks are showing a variety of substructures that are linked to the planet formation process. One unexpected result is that the inner regions of protoplanetary disks, where planets are known to form, can become misaligned with respect to the outer disk, with binaries and planets being a likely cause of the phenomenon.

At the same time, a large fraction of the light curves of young stars still hosting a disk show a short and long term variability, where the star can become partially occulted by material along the line of sight. The timescale of the variability indicated that the occulting material is located in the inner disk.

Before these observational evidence, we had predicted that misaligned disks could occur, by performing hydrodynamical simulations of a disk perturbed by a misaligned binary. These simulations show that the interaction of the stellar binary with the inner gaseous disk can eject a significant amount of material. This provides a link between the resolved misaligned disks and the light curves of the larger population, suggesting that most planet forming disks are misaligned.

A student is invited to produce synthetic light curves of young stars hosting a misaligned inner disk by using the outputs of the already available 3D hydrodynamical simulations, and compare them against observed light curves. The student will become familiar with 3D hydrodynamical simulations and photometry of young stars. The modelling and comparison with the data will be performed with python scripts.

#Simulations  #SPH  #python  #protoplanetarydisks  #exoplanet  #coding  #photometry

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