Thermal Tomography of the Inner Regions of Protoplanetary Disks with the ngVLA and ALMA

Abstract

Understanding the temperature structure of protoplanetary disks is crucial for answering the fundamental question of when and where in the disks rocky planets like our own form. However, the thermal structure of the inner few au of the disks is poorly understood not only because of lack of observational constraints but also because of the uncertainty of accretion heating processes. Here, we propose thermal tomography of the inner regions of protoplanetary disks with the ngVLA and ALMA. The proposed approach is based on the assumption that the inner disk regions are optically thick at submillimeter wavelengths but are marginally optically thin at longer millimeter wavelengths. By combining high-resolution millimeter continuum images from the ngVLA with submillimeter images at comparable resolutions from ALMA, we will be able to reconstruct the radial and vertical structure of the inner few au disk regions. We demonstrate that the thermal tomography we propose can be used to constrain the efficiency of midplane accretion heating, a process that controls the timing of snow-line migration to the rocky planet-forming region, in the few au regions of protoplanetary disks at a distance of 140 pc.