In recent years, thousands of exoplanets have been discovered around a variety of stellar hosts. The disks of gas and dust surrounding young stars are the location and source of material for planet formation. The properties of these protoplanetary disks therefore directly affect the planetary systems that may form. However, the details of the planet formation process are still unclear. In this dissertation, I constrain planet formation mechanisms by measuring the properties of protoplanetary disks, focusing on mass, dust grain growth, and dust settling. I use physically-motivated models and an Artificial Neural Network along with a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) fitting procedure to obtain these and other disk properties. This dissertation compiles the largest sample to date of consistently-modeled protoplanetary disks, probing how disk properties vary with host mass and age.
The occurrence of planetary companions increases as stellar mass decreases. Thus, brown dwarfs (BDs), with smaller masses than pre-main-sequence stars, may commonly host planets. Studying properties of BD disks and comparing them to pre- main-sequence star disks is therefore important for constraining their planet-forming potential. I present spectral energy distribution (SED) models for BD and pre-main- sequence star disks in four star-forming regions. The SEDs consist of archival photometry data spanning optical to millimeter wavelengths. I model the BD disk SEDs using physically-motivated radiative transfer code; pre-main-sequence star SEDs are modeled using a newly-developed MCMC fitting procedure that allows for a more complete analysis of the disk properties. I compare disk masses and dust settling in these two disk categories to gauge how host mass affects these properties.
Typical disk lifetimes are a few tens of millions of years; planet formation likely occurs within the first few million years or less. Comparing how disk properties vary between star-forming regions of different ages can help pinpoint the timeline for planet formation. I present SED models for BDs in four star-forming regions and pre-main-sequence stars in eleven star-forming regions. I obtain the disk masses, dust grain sizes, and amount of dust settling in the disks and discuss the differences and similarities of these properties across regions of varying age.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/46989 |
| Date | 21 September 2023 |
| Creators | Rilinger, Anneliese M. |
| Contributors | Espaillat, Catherine C. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ |
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