http://arxiv.org/abs/1703.05338
The young star Elias 2-27 has recently been observed to posses a massive circumstellar disc with two prominent large-scale spiral arms. In this Letter we perform three-dimensional Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics simulations, radiative transfer modelling, synthetic ALMA imaging and an unsharped masking technique to explore three possibilities for the origin of the observed structures — an undetected companion either internal or external to the spirals, and a self-gravitating disc. We find that a gravitationally unstable disc and a disc with an external companion can produce morphology that is consistent with the observations. In addition, for the latter, we find that the companion could be a relatively massive planetary mass companion (less than approximately 10 – 13 MJup) and located at large radial distances (between approximately 300 – 700 au). We therefore suggest that Elias 2-27 may be one of the first detections of a disc undergoing gravitational instabilities, or a disc that has recently undergone fragmentation to produce a massive companion.
F. Meru, A. Juhasz, J. Ilee, et. al.
Fri, 17 Mar 17
15/50
Comments: 6 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ Letters
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