Planets are formed from dust and gas in protoplanetary disks (PPD) around young stars. A young planet is surrounded by a circumplanetary disk (CPD) in the PPD and is one of the promising objects that we can directly detect. However, the CPDs have not been found at (sub)millimeter wavelengths to date. Recently, we discovered a millimeter blob at a radius of 52 au in the TW Hya disk. This is the first detection of an asymmetric ∼au scale substructure of millimeter continuum emission associated with the PPD. Although the blob can be well-explained by a CPD around a Neptune mass planet, a dust clump accumulated in a small vortex is not ruled out.
In this proposal, we aim at searching for an actively accreting protoplanet at the position of the submillimeter blob with the Hα narrow band filter of SCExAO+VAMPIRES. If a Hα counterpart is detected, combining with our ALMA results, our studies will be the first smoking-gun evidence of an accreting protoplanet surrounded by the CPD, and we will obtain some crucial parameters on the CPD.
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