A look into the protoplanetary disk around WaOph 6 from NIR to mm

Samantha Brown-Sevilla

Tuesday December 1st, 15:00

The discovery of thousands of exoplanets in the past two decades has raised a handful of unanswered questions. Some of the most intriguing ones relate to the formation and early evolution of planets around their parent stars. One way to address these questions is by studying protoplanetary disks, as it has been recently shown that planet formation within these disks can cause features in their surface and mid plane, such as rings, gaps or spirals. Observing protoplanetary disks at different wavelengths allows us to better characterise these features, by understanding their distribution of dust, and, with the help of hydrodynamical (HD) and radiative transfer (RT) simulations, constrain the physical and orbital parameters of a potential planet in formation within the disk. We present polarimetric NIR (SPHERE) observations of the protoplanetary disk around WaOph 6 and compare them with the continuum mm observations (ALMA/DSHARP) in order to study its dust architecture. By performing HD and RT simulations, we constrain the physical and orbital parameters of a potential planet within the disk, and find that a planet of 10 MJup at a distance of 140 au is able to reproduce our observations. Furthermore, we combine observations and simulations to derive constraints for the planet’s contrast.