The Anomalously Low (Sub)Millimeter Spectral Indices of Some Protoplanetary Disks May Be Explained By Dust Self-scattering

Previous (sub)millimeter observations have found that the spectral indices of dust emission from some young stellar objects are lower than that of the blackbody emission in the Rayleigh–Jeans limit (i.e., 2.0). In particular, the recent Atacama Large Millimeter Array observations have spatially resolved that the innermost regions of the protoplanetary disks TW Hya and HD 163296 present anomalously low (i.e., <2.0) millimeter spectral indices. In some previous works, such anomalously low millimeter spectral indices were considered unphysical and were attributed to measurement errors. The present work clarifies that if the albedo is high and is increasing with frequency, it is possible to reproduce such anomalously low spectral indices when the emission source is optically thick. In addition, to yield lower than 2.0 spectral index at (sub)millimeter bands, the required dust maximum grain size amax is on the order of 10–100 μm, which is consistent with the previously derived amax values based on multiwavelength dust polarimetric observations. In light of this, measuring the Stokes I spectral index may also serve as an auxiliary approach for assessing whether the observed dust polarization is mainly due to dust scattering or to the aligned dust grains.