S24A0051

Protoplanetary disks around T Tauri stars commonly exhibit substructures such as gaps, rings and spirals. As these substructures are tightly connected to formation of protoplanets, revealing how these structures form and evolve is essential to understanding of the planet formation process. Answering the above question requires to unveil structures of embedded disks around low-mass protostars, which are progenitors of T Tauri stars and still surrounded by envelope gas and dust. However, the critical missing piece to date is that there are no observational constraints on structures of the embedded disks at infrared (IR) wavelengths. IR observations are crucial to revealing full structures of the disks, as the scattered light at the IR wavelengths traces small dust and is more sensitive to diffuse, extended structures, which are difficult to trace with (sub)mm observations. The recent development in the infrared wavefront sensing allows us to use the adaptive optics (AO) for the embedded disks, which offers high spatial resolutions (∼10 au) to resolve disk structures. Therefore, we propose Keck observations of four embedded disks with AO at K′ and L′ bands to investigate the detectability of emission from the disks at these bands and to probe structures of the disks and envelopes.


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