Constraints On The Crystallinity Of Water Ice In Planet-forming Disks From Infrared Scattered-Light Spectra

The crystallinity of water ice not only records the thermal history experienced by an astronomical body, but also affects the composition of forming planets by controlling the trapping of volatile materials in amorphous ice and their subsequent transport.

An additional structure within the 3~μm water-ice absorption band, known as the Fresnel feature, may serve as a diagnostic of ice crystallinity. Recent observations with the James Webb Space Telescope have detected a Fresnel peak in a debris disk and in Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs).

Here, we propose a portable expression that translates the observed Fresnel peak strength into the degree of crystallinity of icy grains in debris disks. Our formula targets scattered light at around 90∘ angles, which are easily accessible for spatially resolved debris disks regardless of the inclination angle.

181327 to be 10-20%. We also study the Fresnel feature in protoplanetary disks and find that it is generally weaker than in debris disks even for the same crystallinity. We then analyzed a scattered light spectrum of the protoplanetary disk around d216-0939, which shows a weak crystalline feature, and inferred a crystallinity of ∼50%.

We conclude that the Fresnel feature is a reliable observational tracer for ice crystallinity, and future near-IR spectroscopic observations will be crucial to elucidate the crystalline ice evolution.

Integrated scattered-light spectra of debris disks for different grain sizes, rock-to-ice mass ratios, and disk inclinations. The spectra are normalized to the value at 2.5 µm. From top to bottom, the rows show the fiducial case, the rock-rich case (frock = 3), the inclined-disk case (i = 45^◦ ), the edge-on case (i = 90^◦ ), and the spectra extracted from the 90^◦ -scattering regions in the inclined and edge-on cases. The corresponding scattered-light images are shown in the inset. Each image is normalized by its maximum brightness, except for the two edge-on panels in the bottom row, which are shown in logarithmic scale without normalization. Alt text: Scattered-light images and spectra of debris disks. — astro-ph.EP

Kanon Nakazawa, Ryo Tazaki

Comments: 17 pages, 13 figures, Accepted for publication in PASJ
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:2605.19326 [astro-ph.EP](or arXiv:2605.19326v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.19326
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Submission history
From: Kanon Nakazawa
[v1] Tue, 19 May 2026 04:03:27 UTC (3,701 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19326

Astrobiology, Astrochemistry, interstellar,