Witnessing the Birth of Solar System Analogs

The discovery of thousands of exoplanets over the last couple of decades has shown that the birth of planets is a very efficient process in nature. Recent high-angular resolution observations of young circumstellar disks with ALMA have shown the existence of several structures that are reminiscent of the interaction with one or more planets in the disk. Therefore, most of the theoretical models investigated so far to interpret these observations assume the presence of planets inside the disk. However, in several cases this interpretation is not unique, as several known hydrodynamical instabilities have the potential to generate structures which are similar to the ones detected by the recent observations. The main goal of this project is to investigate the predictions of models of disks undergoing hydrodynamical instabilities for hi-res observations at sub-mm and mm wavelengths. This will allow us to i) perform a quantitative comparison of the predicted disk substructures with the results of recent ALMA observations, as well as to ii) calculate the prediction for possible future observations with the ngVLA, which will be capable of mapping nearby disks at unprecedented resolutions below 1 astronomical unit.