TY - JOUR
T1 - exoALMA. XIX. Confirmation of non-thermal line broadening in the DM Tau protoplanetary disk
AU - Hardiman, Caitlyn
AU - Pinte, Christophe
AU - Price, Daniel J.
AU - Hilder, Thomas
AU - Hammond, Iain
AU - Danilovich, Taïssa
AU - Andrews, Sean M.
AU - Teague, Richard
AU - Rosotti, Giovanni
AU - Flock, Mario
AU - Cataldi, Gianni
AU - Bae, Jaehan
AU - Barraza-Alfaro, Marcelo
AU - Benisty, Myriam
AU - Cuello, Nicolás
AU - Curone, Pietro
AU - Czekala, Ian
AU - Facchini, Stefano
AU - Fasano, Daniele
AU - Fukagawa, Misato
AU - Galloway-Sprietsma, Maria
AU - Garg, Himanshi
AU - Hall, Cassandra
AU - Huang, Jane
AU - Ilee, John D.
AU - Izquierdo, Andres F.
AU - Kanagawa, Kazuhiro
AU - Lesur, Geoffroy
AU - Lodato, Giuseppe
AU - Longarini, Cristiano
AU - Loomis, Ryan
AU - Menard, Francois
AU - Orihara, Ryuta
AU - Stadler, Jochen
AU - Yen, Hsi-Wei
AU - Fernandez, Gaylor Wafflard-
AU - Wilner, David J.
AU - Winter, Andrew J.
AU - Wölfer, Lisa
AU - Yoshida, Tomohiro C.
AU - Zawadzki, Brianna
N1 - Funding: C. Har. and T.H. are funded by Research Training Program Scholarships from the Australian Government. C. Har., D.J.P., C.P., T.H., and I.H. acknowledge funding from the Australian Research Council via DP220103767 and DP240103290. C. Har. acknowledges support from the Astronomical Society of Australia. T.D. is supported in part by the Australian Research Council through a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE230100183). G.R. acknowledges funding from the Fondazione Cariplo, grant No. 2022-1217, and the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon Europe Research & Innovation Programme under grant agreement No. 101039651 (DiscEvol). J.B. acknowledges support from NASA XRP grant No. 80NSSC23K1312. M.B., D.F., J.S., and I.H. have received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (PROTOPLANETS, grant agreement No. 101002188). N.C. has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union Horizon Europe research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 101042275, project Stellar-MADE). P.C. acknowledges support by the ANID BASAL project FB210003. S.F. is funded by the European Union (ERC, UNVEIL, 101076613) and acknowledges financial contribution from PRIN-MUR 2022YP5ACE. M.Fl. has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 757957). M.Fu. is supported by a grant-in-aid from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (KAKENHI: No. JP22H01274). C. Hal. gratefully acknowledges support from the US National Science Foundation grants 2511673 and 2407679, NRAO SOSPADA-036, National Geographic Society, and the Georgia Museum of Natural History. J.D.I. acknowledges support from an STFC Ernest Rutherford Fellowship (ST/W004119/1) and a University Academic Fellowship from the University of Leeds. Support for A.F.I. was provided by NASA through NASA Hubble Fellowship grant No. HST-HF2-51532.001-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS5-26555. G.Le. and G.W.-F. have received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 815559 (MHDiscs)). G.W.-F. was granted access to the HPC resources of IDRIS under the allocation A0120402231 made by GENCI. C.L. and G.Lo. have received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 823823 (DUSTBUSTERS). C.L. acknowledges support from the UK Science and Technology research Council (STFC) via the consolidated grant ST/W000997/1. F.Me. acknowledges funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 101053020, project Dust2Planets). H.-W.Y. acknowledges support from the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) in Taiwan through grant NSTC 113-2112-M-001-035- and from the Academia Sinica Career Development Award (AS-CDA-111-M03). T.C.Y. is supported by Grant-in-Aid for JSPS Fellows JP23KJ1008. A.J.W. has been supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101104656) and by the Royal Society through a University Research Fellowship, grant No. URF\R1\241791. Support for B.Z. was provided by the Brinson Foundation.
PY - 2026/2/1
Y1 - 2026/2/1
N2 - Turbulence is expected to transport angular momentum and drive mass accretion in protoplanetary disks. One way to directly measure turbulent motion in disks is through molecular line broadening. DM Tau is one of only a few disks with claimed detection of nonthermal line broadening of 0.25cs–0.33cs, where cs is the sound speed. Using the radiative transfer code MCFOST within a Bayesian inference framework that evaluates over five million disk models to efficiently sample the parameter space, we fit high-resolution ( 0.″15 , 28 m s−1) 12CO J = 3–2 observations of DM Tau from the exoALMA Large Program. This approach enables us to simultaneously constrain the disk structure and kinematics, revealing a significant nonthermal contribution to the line width of ∼0.4cs, inconsistent with purely thermal motions. Using the CO-based disk structure as a starting point, we reproduce the CS J = 7–6 emission well, demonstrating that the CS (which is more sensitive to nonthermal motions than CO) agrees with the turbulence inferred from the CO fit. Establishing a well-constrained background disk model further allows us to identify residual structures in the moment maps that deviate from the expected emission, revealing localized perturbations that may trace forming planets. This framework provides a powerful general approach for extracting disk structure and nonthermal broadening directly from molecular line data and can be applied to other disks with high-quality observations.
AB - Turbulence is expected to transport angular momentum and drive mass accretion in protoplanetary disks. One way to directly measure turbulent motion in disks is through molecular line broadening. DM Tau is one of only a few disks with claimed detection of nonthermal line broadening of 0.25cs–0.33cs, where cs is the sound speed. Using the radiative transfer code MCFOST within a Bayesian inference framework that evaluates over five million disk models to efficiently sample the parameter space, we fit high-resolution ( 0.″15 , 28 m s−1) 12CO J = 3–2 observations of DM Tau from the exoALMA Large Program. This approach enables us to simultaneously constrain the disk structure and kinematics, revealing a significant nonthermal contribution to the line width of ∼0.4cs, inconsistent with purely thermal motions. Using the CO-based disk structure as a starting point, we reproduce the CS J = 7–6 emission well, demonstrating that the CS (which is more sensitive to nonthermal motions than CO) agrees with the turbulence inferred from the CO fit. Establishing a well-constrained background disk model further allows us to identify residual structures in the moment maps that deviate from the expected emission, revealing localized perturbations that may trace forming planets. This framework provides a powerful general approach for extracting disk structure and nonthermal broadening directly from molecular line data and can be applied to other disks with high-quality observations.
KW - CO line emission
KW - Protoplanetary disks
KW - T Tauri stars
KW - High angular resolution
U2 - 10.3847/2041-8213/ae313a
DO - 10.3847/2041-8213/ae313a
M3 - Article
SN - 2041-8205
VL - 997
JO - The Astrophysical Journal Letters
JF - The Astrophysical Journal Letters
IS - 2
M1 - L47
ER -