A Dynamical Measurement of the Disk Mass in Elias 2–27

Recent multi-wavelength Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations of the protoplanetary disk orbiting around Elias 2–27 revealed a two-armed spiral structure. The observed morphology, together with the young age of the star and the disk-to-star mass ratio estimated from dust-continuum emission, make this system a perfect laboratory to investigate the role of self-gravity in the early phases of star formation. This is particularly interesting if we consider that gravitational instabilities could be a fundamental first step for the formation of planetesimals and planets. In this Letter, we model the rotation curve obtained by CO data of Elias 2–27 with a theoretical rotation curve, including both the disk self-gravity and the star contribution to the gravitational potential. We compare this model with a purely Keplerian one and with a simple power-law function. We find that (especially for the 13CO isotopologue) the rotation curve is better described by considering not only the star, but also the disk self-gravity. We are thus able to obtain for the first time a dynamical estimate of the disk mass of 0.08 ± 0.04 M⊙ and the star mass of 0.46 ± 0.03 M⊙ (in the more general case), the latter being comparable with previous estimates. From these values, we derive that the disk is 17% of the star mass, meaning that it could be prone to gravitational instabilities. This result would strongly support the hypothesis that the two spiral arms are generated by gravitational instabilities.