Measuring the gas mass of the protoplanetary disk around HD 179218 with CO isotopologues
Abstract
Carbon monoxide (CO) isotopologues are widely used to estimate protoplanetary disk gas masses, but their reliability is often compromised by CO freeze-out and subsequent chemical processing. The disk around the luminous Herbig star HD~179218 (L* ∼ 100 L⊙, M* ∼ 3.0 M⊙) offers a rare test case of CO-based mass measurements. Its CO snowline lies beyond the outer disk edge, and thus CO remains in the gas phase throughout. We present ALMA and NOEMA observations of six CO isotopologue lines (13CO, C18O, and C17O, J=2--1 and 1--0). Fitting the spectral energy distribution yields Mdust ≈ 3 × 10−5 M⊙. Modeling CO isotopologue emission with the thermochemical code DALI yields the gas-disk characteristic radius (Rc ≈ 90~au) and the gas mass (Mgas ≈ 8 × 10−3 M⊙). These results yield a gas-to-dust ratio of ∼270 for our fiducial dust opacity (amax = 1~mm), above the canonical interstellar value of ∼100. The thermal structure of our best-fitting model confirms that CO never freezes out in this disk, so the elevated ratio is not an artifact of CO depletion; together with the compact millimeter dust disk relative to the gas disk, it is consistent with substantial inward radial drift of millimeter dust. In addition, we find a gas cavity inside 50\,au that encloses the compact millimeter dust disk---the inverse of a typical transition disk---which we attribute to photoevaporative clearing of the inner gas after the pebbles drifted inward. HD~179218 thus provides a clean benchmark for studying the gas mass distribution and gas--dust interaction in protoplanetary disks, free from the CO-depletion biases that affect colder disks.
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BibTeX
@misc{weichmann2026measuring,
title = {{Measuring the gas mass of the protoplanetary disk around HD 179218 with CO isotopologues}},
author = {Nina Weichmann and Ke Zhang and Leon Trapman and Ao Zhang},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2611.04030},
eprint = {2611.04030},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04030},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Measuring the gas mass of the protoplanetary disk around HD 179218 with CO isotopologues
AU - Nina Weichmann
AU - Ke Zhang
AU - Leon Trapman
AU - Ao Zhang
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/02
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2611.04030
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04030
AB - Carbon monoxide (CO) isotopologues are widely used to estimate protoplanetary disk gas masses, but their reliability is often compromised by CO freeze-out and subsequent chemical processing. The disk around the luminous Herbig star HD~179218 (L_* ∼ 100 L_⊙, M_* ∼ 3.0 M_⊙) offers a rare test case of CO-based mass measurements. Its CO snowline lies beyond the outer disk edge, and thus CO remains in the gas phase throughout. We present ALMA and NOEMA observations of six CO isotopologue lines (^13CO, C^18O, and C^17O, J=2--1 and 1--0). Fitting the spectral energy distribution yields M_dust ≈ 3 × 10^−5 M_⊙. Modeling CO isotopologue emission with the thermochemical code DALI yields the gas-disk characteristic radius (R_c ≈ 90~au) and the gas mass (M_gas ≈ 8 × 10^−3 M_⊙). These results yield a gas-to-dust ratio of ∼270 for our fiducial dust opacity (a_max = 1~mm), above the canonical interstellar value of ∼100. The thermal structure of our best-fitting model confirms that CO never freezes out in this disk, so the elevated ratio is not an artifact of CO depletion; together with the compact millimeter dust disk relative to the gas disk, it is consistent with substantial inward radial drift of millimeter dust. In addition, we find a gas cavity inside 50\,au that encloses the compact millimeter dust disk---the inverse of a typical transition disk---which we attribute to photoevaporative clearing of the inner gas after the pebbles drifted inward. HD~179218 thus provides a clean benchmark for studying the gas mass distribution and gas--dust interaction in protoplanetary disks, free from the CO-depletion biases that affect colder disks.
ER -