BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Astron. Space Sci.
Sec. Planetary Science
This article is part of the Research TopicBirthplaces of Planets in Their Earliest Stages: Towards Characterization of Young Protostellar DisksView all articles
Dust traps and gas kinematic signature in a crescent structure of a planet-forming disk
Provisionally accepted
- 1International Research Institute for Radio Astronomy, Saint-Martin-d'Hères, France
- 2Institut de Planetologie et d'Astrophysique de Grenoble, Grenoble, France
- 3Monash University School of Physics and Astronomy, Clayton, Australia
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In the past few years, ALMA unveiled a variety of substructures (rings, spirals, crescents) in the continuum emission of most protoplanetary disks imaged at high spatial resolution. While the majority of disks presents axisymmetric ring-like structures in the dust brightness distribution, some sources display asymmetric morphologies (blobs, crescents) that have been often associated to vortices and/or mechanisms generated by the presence of one or more embedded planets. In this brief research report we present the analysis of the arc structure observed in the dust continuum emission of the disk around HD 163296, using high resolution (∼8 au) matched continuum data from ALMA at four wavelengths. We characterize in detail the arc structures and present a kinematic signature observed in the CS(3-2) emission at the same location. Our results indicate that the crescent is caused by differential dust trapping in a local pressure maxima, for which plausible mechanisms can be the presence of a vortex or trapping in a Lagrangian point of the planet-star system.
Keywords: Crescent, CS, HD 163296, Planet-disk interaction, protoplanetary disk, vortex
Received: 17 Oct 2025; Accepted: 27 Jan 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Guidi, Menard, Price, Villenave and Ma. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Greta Guidi
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