The centimeter emission from planet-forming disks in Taurus

The last decade has witnessed remarkable advances in the characterization of the (sub-)millimeter emission from planet-forming disks. Conversely, the study of (sub-)centimeter emission has made more limited progress, to the point that only a few exceptional disk-bearing objects have been characterized in the centimeter regime. This work takes a broad view of the centimeter emission from a large sample with Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) observations that is selected from previous Atacama Large (sub-)Millimeter Array (ALMA) surveys of more representative disks in brightness and extent. We report on the detection and characterization of flux at centimeter wavelengths from 21 sources in the Taurus star-forming region. Complemented by literature and archival data, the entire photometry from 0.85 mm to 6 cm is fit by a two-component model that determines the ubiquitous presence of free-free emission entangled with the dust emission. The flux density of the free-free emission is found to scale with the accretion rate but is independent of the outer-disk morphology depicted by ALMA. The dust emission at 2 cm is still appreciable and offers the possibility to extract an unprecedented large set of dust spectral indices in the centimeter regime. A pronounced change between the median millimeter indices (2.3) and centimeter indices (2.8) suggests that a large portion of the disk emission is optically thick up to 3 mm. The comparison of both indices and fluxes with the ALMA disk extent indicates that this portion can be as large as 40 au and suggests that the grain population within this disk region that emits the observed centimeter emission is similar in disks with different sizes and morphologies. All these results await confirmation and dedicated dust modeling once facilities such as next generation VLA (ngVLA) or Square Kilometre Array (SKA)-mid are able to resolve the centimeter emission from planet-forming disks and disentangle the various components.