Issue |
A&A
Volume 686, June 2024
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | L6 | |
Number of page(s) | 6 | |
Section | Letters to the Editor | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202450187 | |
Published online | 28 May 2024 |
Letter to the Editor
Angular momentum transport via gravitational instability in the Elias 2–27 disc
1
Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, Madingley Road, Cambridge CB3 0HA, UK
e-mail: cl2000@cam.ac.uk
2
Dipartimento di Fisica, Università degli Studi di Milano, Via Celoria 16, Milano 20133, Italy
3
Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC V8P 5C2, Canada
4
European Southern Observatory, Karl-Schwarzschild-Strasse 2, 85748 Garching bei Munchen, Germany
5
Department of Physics and Astronomy, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA
6
Center for Simulational Physics, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA
7
Leiden Observatory, Leiden University, PO Box 9513 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands
Received:
29
March
2024
Accepted:
4
May
2024
Gravitational instability is thought to be one of the main drivers of angular momentum transport in young protoplanetary discs. The disc around Elias 2−27 offers a unique example of gravitational instability at work. It is young and massive, displaying two prominent spiral arms in dust continuum emission and global non-axisymmetric kinematic signatures in molecular line data. In this work, we used archival ALMA observations of 13CO line emission to measure the efficiency of angular momentum transport in the Elias 2−27 system through the kinematic signatures generated by gravitational instability, known as “GI wiggles”. Assuming the angular momentum is transported by the observed spiral structure and leveraging previously-derived dynamical disc mass measurements, the amount of angular momentum transport we found corresponds to an α-viscosity of α = 0.038 ± 0.018. This value implies an accretion rate onto the central star of log10 Ṁ⋆ = −6.99 ± 0.17 M⊙ yr−1, which reproduces the one observed value of log10 Ṁ⋆,obs = −7.2 ± 0.5 M⊙ yr−1 very well. The excellent agreement we have found serves as further proof that gravitational instability is the main driver of angular momentum transport acting in this system.
Key words: hydrodynamics / instabilities / turbulence / protoplanetary disks
© The Authors 2024
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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