Physical origin of protostellar disk brightness asymmetries

Determine whether the brightness asymmetries observed in embedded protostellar disks represent genuine physical structures or artifacts of radiative-transfer effects in optically thick disk regions.

Background

The visibility-plane models reproduce the overall morphology and large-scale asymmetries of most disks in the eDisk sample, but the authors cannot uniquely interpret these asymmetries physically. In optically thick regions, radiative-transfer effects can produce apparent brightness variations that resemble genuine substructures such as rings, gaps, or localized enhancements.

Resolving this ambiguity is important for determining whether the observed asymmetries provide evidence for physical disk structures and early planet-formation processes. The authors identify detailed radiative-transfer modeling and multi-wavelength observations, especially at 3 mm where emission is expected to be more optically thin, as approaches for distinguishing intrinsic structures from opacity-related effects.