Oral Presentation

Kinematic Signatures of Warps in Disks

Author(s): Elouan Spaan (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy)

Presenter: Elouan Spaan (PhD student at Max Planck Institute for Astronomy)

Misaligned or 'warped' disks are ubiquitous as they are a natural by-product of disk formation. In protoplanetary disks, mechanisms that can lead to the formation of warps include perturbations from (sub) stellar companions, flybys, and (late stage) infall. Regardless of origin, warps have a significant impact on the disk structure and through this, on planet formation. Warps can be constrained using disk kinematics, as they lead to large-scale deviations of the gas velocity from Keplerian rotation. Kinematic structures of warps can potentially be identified by fitting a simple Keplerian model to measured line-of-sight velocities of gas emission lines and analysing the residual maps. However, the specific signatures remain unconstrained because of unresolved degeneracy with other structure-altering processes such as radial gas flows. We therefore present an alternative approach where we include a warped geometry in the kinematical model, with the aims of lifting the degeneracy. In this talk, I will first illustrate the feasibility and comparative performance of this method through application to mock observations of warped disks. I will then present our results on identifying and characterising kinematic signatures of warps in a selection of target disks as observed with the exoALMA Large Program, and discuss these results in the context of their possible origins.