A new study looked at almost 900 young protoplanetary disks in Orion A. They all display a surprisingly strong age-mass correlation.
” It’s published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, and the lead author is Sierk van Terwisga, a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany.
But other factors affect disk mass too, and those factors vary from disk to disk. Things like stellar wind and irradiation from nearby stars outside the disk can also affect mass. So how were the researchers able to isolate those effects in such a large sample?, which is part of the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex . The OMCC is about 1350 light-years away and home to the well-studied Orion Nebula, a feature even backyard astronomers can see.
This is a good sample because all disks belong to the same cloud. That means their chemistry is uniform, and they all have the same history. The nearby Orion Nebular Cluster hosts some massive stars that could affect other disks, so the team rejected any disks in Orion A closer than 13 light-years to the ONC.
A detailed survey of almost 900 protoplanetary disks creates a lot of data, and all that data has to be processed before it has any collective meaning. If the team had relied on existing methods, it would have taken about six months to process all that data. Instead, they developed their own method to handle the data using. What would’ve taken months took less than one day. “Our new approach improved the processing speed by a factor of 900,” co-author Raymond Oonk said.
This figure shows the six low-mass and low-density clusters of YSOs in the study. Despite their wide distribution in Orion A, the disks show the same mass-age correlation. Image Credit: S.E. van Terwisga et al. 2022.
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