skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Search for: All records

Creators/Authors contains: "Kurtovic, Nicolás T"

Note: When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external site maintained by the publisher. Some full text articles may not yet be available without a charge during the embargo (administrative interval).
What is a DOI Number?

Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from this site.

  1. Abstract The inward drift of millimeter–centimeter sized pebbles in protoplanetary disks has become an important part of our current theories of planet formation and, more recently, planet composition as well. The gas-to-dust size ratio of protoplanetary disks can provide an important constraint on how pebbles have drifted inward, provided that observational effects, especially resolution, can be accounted for. Here we present a method for fitting beam-convolved models to integrated intensity maps of line emission using theastropyPython package and use it to fit12CO moment zero maps of 10 Lupus and 10 Upper Scorpius protoplanetary disks from the ALMA Survey of Gas Evolution of PROtoplanetary Disks (AGE-PRO) Program, a sample of disks around M3-K6 stars that cover the  ∼1–6 Myr of gas disk evolution. From the unconvolved best fit models, we measure the gas disk size ( R CO , 90 % model ), which we combine with the dust disk size ( R dust , 90 % FRANK ) from continuum visibility fits from M. Vioque et al. to compute beam-corrected gas-to-dust size ratios. In our sample, we find gas-to-dust size ratios between  ∼1 and  ∼5.5, with a median value of 2.7 8 0.32 + 0.37 . Contrary to models of dust evolution that predict an increasing size ratio with time, we find that the younger disks in Lupus have similar (or even larger) median ratios ( 3.0 2 0.33 + 0.33 ) than the older disks in Upper Sco ( 2.4 6 0.38 + 0.53 ) . A possible explanation for this discrepancy is that pebble drift is halted in dust traps combined with truncation of the gas disk by external photoevaporation in Upper Sco, although survivorship bias could also play a role. 
    more » « less
    Free, publicly-accessible full text available July 31, 2026
  2. Abstract We perform visibility fitting to the dust continuum Band 6 1.3 mm data of the 30 protoplanetary disks in the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array Survey of Gas Evolution of PROtoplanetary Disks (AGE-PRO) Large Program. We obtain disk geometries, dust-disk radii, and azimuthally symmetric radial profiles of the intensity of the dust continuum emission. We examine the presence of continuum substructures in the AGE-PRO sample by using these radial profiles and their residuals. We detect substructures in 15 out of 30 disks. We report five disks with large (>15 au) inner dust cavities. The Ophiuchus Class I disks show dust-disk substructures in ∼80% of the resolved sources. This evidences the early formation of substructures in protoplanetary disks. A spiral is identified in IRS 63, hinting to gravitational instability in this massive disk. We compare our dust-disk brightness radial profiles with gas-disk brightness radial profiles and discuss colocal substructures in both tracers. In addition, we discuss the evolution of dust-disk radii and substructures across Ophiuchus, Lupus, and Upper Scorpius. We find that disks in Lupus and Upper Scorpius with large inner dust cavities have typical gas-disk masses, suggesting an abundance of dust cavities in these regions. The prevalence of pressure dust traps at later ages is supported by a potential trend with time with more disks with large inner dust cavities (ortransition disks) in Upper Scorpius and the absence of evolution of dust-disk sizes with time in the AGE-PRO sample. We propose this is caused by an evolutionary sequence with a high fraction of protoplanetary disks with inner protoplanets carving dust cavities. 
    more » « less
    Free, publicly-accessible full text available July 31, 2026
  3. Abstract The potential for planet formation of a circumstellar disk depends on the dust and gas reservoirs, which evolve as a function of the disk age. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array AGE-PRO Large Program has measured several disk properties across three star-forming regions of different ages, and in this study, we compare the observational results to dust evolution simulations. UsingDustPyfor the dust evolution, andRADMC-3Dfor the radiative transfer, we ran a large grid of models spanning stellar masses of 0.25, 0.50, 0.75, and 1.0M, with different initial conditions, including: disk sizes, disk gas masses, and dust-to-gas ratio, and viscosity. Our models are performed assuming smooth, weakly, or strongly substructured disks, aiming to investigate if any observational trend can favor or exclude the presence of dust traps. The observed gas masses in the disks of the AGE-PRO sample are not reproducible with our models, which only consider viscous evolution with constantα, suggesting that additional physical mechanisms play a role in the evolution of the gas mass of disks. When comparing the dust continuum emission fluxes and sizes at 1.3 mm, we find that most of the disks in the AGE-PRO sample are consistent with simulations that have either weak or strong dust traps. The evolution of spectral index in the AGE-PRO sample is also suggestive of an unresolved population of dust traps. Future observations at high angular resolution are still needed to test several hypotheses that result from comparing the observations to our simulations, including that more massive disks in gas mass have the potential to form dust traps at larger disk radii. 
    more » « less
    Free, publicly-accessible full text available July 31, 2026
  4. We present the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array Survey of Gas Evolution of PROtoplanetary Disks (AGE-PRO), a large program of the ALMA. AGE-PRO aims to systematically trace the evolution of gas disk mass and size throughout the lifetime of protoplanetary disks. It uses a carefully selected sample of 30 disks around M3-K6 stars in three nearby star-forming regions: Ophiuchus (0.5–1 Myr), Lupus (1–3 Myr), and Upper Sco (2–6 Myr). Assuming the three regions had similar initial conditions and evolutionary paths, we find the median gas disk mass appears to decrease with age. Ophiuchus disks have the highest median gas mass (6MJup), while the Lupus and Upper Sco disks have significantly lower median masses (0.68 and 0.44MJup, respectively). Notably, the gas and dust disk masses appear to evolve on different timescales. This is evidenced by the median gas-to-dust mass ratio, which decreases from 122 in the youngest disks (<1 Myr) to 46 in Lupus disks, and then increases to 120 in the Upper Sco disks. The median gas disk sizes range between 74 and 110 au, suggesting that typical gas disks are much smaller than those of well-studied, massive disks. Population synthesis models suggest that magnetohydrodynamic wind-driven accretion can reproduce median disk properties across all three regions, when assuming compact disks with a declining magnetic field over time. In contrast, turbulent-driven models overestimate gas masses of >1 Myr disks by an order of magnitude. Here, we discuss the program’s motivation, survey design, sample selection, observation and data calibration processes, and highlight the initial results. 
    more » « less
    Free, publicly-accessible full text available July 31, 2026
  5. Abstract The evolution of the gas mass of planet-forming disks around young stars is crucial for our understanding of planet formation, yet it has proven hard to constrain observationally, due both to the difficulties of measuring gas masses and the lack of a homogeneous sample. Here we present a large grid of thermochemical models that we use to measure protoplanetary gas disk masses of AGE-PRO, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array survey of Gas Evolution in PROtoplanetary disks. AGE-PRO covers a sample of 30 disks around similar spectral type (M3-K6) stars with ages between 0.1 and 10 Myr. Our approach is to simultaneously fit observations of CO isotopologues and N2H+, a complementary molecule produced when CO freezes out. We find that the median gas mass of the three regions decreases over time, from 7 . 0 2.6 + 4.4 × 1 0 3 M in Ophiuchus (≲1 Myr) to 9 . 4 3.4 + 5.4 × 1 0 4 M for Lupus (∼1–3 Myr) and 6 . 8 2.8 + 5.1 × 1 0 4 M for Upper Sco (∼2–6 Myr), with ∼1 dex scatter in gas mass in each region. We note that the gas mass distributions for Lupus and Upper Sco look very similar, which could be due to survivorship bias for the latter. The median bulk CO abundance in the CO emitting layer is found to be a factor ∼10 lower than the interstellar medium value but does not significantly change between Lupus and Upper Sco. From Lupus to Upper Sco, the median gas-to-dust mass ratio increases by a factor ∼3 from ∼40 to ∼120, suggesting efficient inward pebble drift and/or the formation of planetesimals. 
    more » « less
    Free, publicly-accessible full text available July 31, 2026
  6. Abstract The architecture of planetary systems depends on the evolution of the disks in which they form. In this work, we develop a population synthesis approach to interpret the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array survey of Gas Evolution of PROtoplanetary Disks (AGE-PRO) measurements of disk gas mass and size considering two scenarios: turbulence-driven evolution with photoevaporative winds and MHD wind-driven evolution. A systematic method is proposed to constrain the distribution of disk parameters from the disk fractions, accretion rates, disk gas masses, and CO gas sizes. We find that turbulence-driven accretion with initially compact disks (R0 ≃ 5–20 au), low mass-loss rates, and relatively long viscous timescales (tν,0 ≃ 0.4–3 Myr orαSS ≃ 2–4 × 10−4) can reproduce the disk fractions and gas sizes. However, the distribution of apparent disk lifetimes defined as the M D / M ̇ * ratio is severely overestimated by turbulence-driven models. On the other hand, MHD wind-driven accretion can reproduce the bulk properties of disk populations from Ophiuchus to Upper Scorpius assuming compact disks with an initial magnetization of aboutβ ≃ 105DW ≃ 0.5–1 × 10−3) and a magnetic field that declines with time. More studies are needed to confirm the low masses found by AGE-PRO, notably for compact disks that question turbulence-driven accretion. The constrained synthetic disk populations can now be used for realistic planet population models to interpret the properties of planetary systems on a statistical basis. 
    more » « less
    Free, publicly-accessible full text available July 31, 2026