Recovering the gas properties of protoplanetary disks through parametric visibility modeling: MHO 6

Abstract

Context. The composition and distribution of the gas in a protoplanetary disk plays a key role in shaping the outcome of the planet formation process. Observationally, the recovery of information such as the emission height and brightness temperature from interfer-ometric data is often limited by the imaging processes. Aims. To overcome the limitations of image-reconstruction when analyzing gas emission from interferometric observations, we have introduced a parametric model to fit the main observable properties of the gaseous disk component in the visibility plane. This approach is also known as parametric visibility modeling. Methods. We applied our parametric visibility modeling to the gas brightness distribution of the molecular line emission from 12CO J = 3–2 and 13CO J = 3–2 in the disk around MHO 6, a very-low-mass star in the Taurus star-forming Region. To improve the flux fidelity of our parametric models, we combined models with different pixel resolution before the computation of their visibilities, referred to as “nesting images.” Results. When we apply our parametric visibility modeling to MHO 6, with independent fits to the emission from its CO isopoto-logues, the models return the same consistent results for the stellar mass, disk geometry, and central velocity. The surface height and brightness temperature distribution are also recovered. When compared to other disks, MHO 6 surface height is among the most elevated surfaces, consistent with the predictions for disks around very-low-mass stars. Conclusions. This work demonstrates the feasibility of running rapidly iterable parametric visibility models in moderate resolution and sensitivity interferometric observations. More importantly, this methodology opens the analysis of disk’s gas morphology to observations where image-based techniques are unable to robustly operate, as in the case of the compact disk around MHO 6.