Population incidence and evolutionary distribution of gravitationally unstable discs

Determine how common self-gravitating discs are at different evolutionary stages and what fraction of substructure in young discs is attributable to gravitational instability.

Background

The review argues that understanding gravitational instability requires moving beyond a small number of detailed case studies, such as Elias 2–27, AB Aur, and IM Lup, toward a statistical characterization across the protoplanetary-disc population.

The youngest and most embedded systems, where instability is expected to be most prevalent, remain difficult to observe because of envelope contamination and optical-depth effects. Consequently, the prevalence of self-gravitating discs and the contribution of gravitational instability to observed substructure remain unresolved population-level questions.