Testing Models of Disk Formation and Gravito-Viscous Evolution Against Observations of Young Protoplanetary Disks

Abstract Young protoplanetary disks have received increasing attention in recent years, due to observations revealing the presence of substructures in disks younger than one million years, suggesting that planet formation may begin earlier than previously thought. Other recent observations have provided new insights into the evolution of gas and dust in these early stages, enabling comparisons with evolved Class II disks. Yet the physical processes governing the earliest stages of disk evolution remain poorly understood. In this paper, we present two-dimensional thin-disk hydrodynamical simulations of the formation and early evolution of protoplanetary disks, under the influence of self-gravity and turbulent viscosity alone. We explore various properties of disks forming from the collapse of clouds with a range of initial masses and we compare our results with surveys of protoplanetary disks across multiple evolutionary stages. Our simulations broadly reproduce key observational constraints, including the mm fluxes of Class 0 disks and the dust disk radii of later stages. However, our models do not explain the observed gas and dust disk masses of Class I and II disks: while they account for the most massive observed disks, they fail to reproduce the least massive ones. We discuss that simulations incorporating the influence of the star-forming environment might be needed to resolve this discrepancy.