Exploring chemical techniques to locate young gas giants in TW Hya using ALMA data

Planets form in accretion disks surrounding young stars. The detection of forming planets is crucial to understanding the origins of a mature planetary system from disk grains and gasses. The aim of this project is to use the chemical impact of a forming gas giant, namely its heating effects on the surrounding disk. In particular, we use HCN sublimation to probe protoplanetary disks indirectly for large planets, e.g., Jupiter size or greater. Using data from the ALMA TW Hya Rosetta Project, we apply two complementary imaging techniques: baseline trimming and unsharp mask imaging. While baseline trimming removes data from large scale emission to expose hidden structure, unsharp mask imaging subtracts a smoothed model to reveal asymmetries in the disk. We explore these techniques on independent channels and on the velocity integrated images. In addition, we compare these results to those we derive using the publicly available GoFish code’s (R. Teague) background residual feature. We can exclude especially luminous planetary or substellar companions using this method since no strong asymmetries in HCN are found. Finally, the potential detection limitations in unsharp mask imaging were gauged by inserting point sources of varying brightness in the Rosetta data, which determines the detectable minimum brightness of a possible planet.