Artist’s illustration of gas disk evolution as revealed by the AGE-PRO program (IMAGE)

University of Arizona

Artist’s illustration of gas disk evolution as revealed by the AGE-PRO program

Caption

The AGE-PRO program observed 30 protoplanetary disks around sun-like stars to measure how gas disk mass changes with age. The top row illustrates the previously known trend: the fraction of young stars with disks declines over time. The AGE-PRO study, for the first time, shows that the median gas disk mass of the surviving disks also decreases with age. Disks younger than 1 million years typically have several Jupiter masses of gas, but this drops rapidly to below 1 Jupiter mass in older systems. Interestingly, the surviving disks in the 1–3 million and 2–6 million-year age ranges appear to maintain similar median gas masses.

Credit

Carolina Agurto-Gangas and the AGE-PRO collaboration

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