Academia Sinica Logo

Settling, Scattering, and Submillimeter Polarization of Dust in Planet-Forming Disks

Abstract

Planet formation mechanisms are intimately tied to the structure of protoplanetary disks and the properties of dust grains. The first theme of the talk focuses on dust settling, which may serve as a prerequisite for triggering streaming instability by enhancing the midplane dust-to-gas ratio in the protoplanetary disks. Utilizing high angular resolution observations from ALMA, I present vertically resolved, edge-on disks around HH 212 mms and IRAS 04302+2247. The results demonstrate that the dust has not completely settled yet in these young systems. The second theme attempts to understand the grain sizes using submillimeter continuum polarization. While dust scattering from spherical/randomly aligned grains can explain much of the polarization patterns, I show that scattering of aligned grains can simultaneously explain the multiwavelength polarization pattern for HL Tau and also the polarization substructure.