Measuring the gas mass of the protoplanetary disk around HD 179218 with CO isotopologues

Abstract

Carbon monoxide (CO) isotopologues are widely used to estimate protoplanetary disk gas masses, but their reliability is often compromised by CO freeze-out and subsequent chemical processing. The disk around the luminous Herbig star HD~179218 ($L_* \sim 100\,L_\odot$, $M_* \sim 3.0\,M_\odot$) offers a rare test case of CO-based mass measurements. Its CO snowline lies beyond the outer disk edge, and thus CO remains in the gas phase throughout. We present ALMA and NOEMA observations of six CO isotopologue lines ($^{13}$CO, C$^{18}$O, and C$^{17}$O, $J$=2--1 and 1--0). Fitting the spectral energy distribution yields $M_{dust} \approx 3 \times 10^{-5}\, M_\odot$. Modeling CO isotopologue emission with the thermochemical code DALI yields the gas-disk characteristic radius ($R_{c} \approx 90$~au) and the gas mass ($M_{gas} \approx 8 \times 10^{-3}\, M_\odot$). These results yield a gas-to-dust ratio of $\sim$270 for our fiducial dust opacity ($a_{\rm max} = 1$~mm), above the canonical interstellar value of $\sim$100. The thermal structure of our best-fitting model confirms that CO never freezes out in this disk, so the elevated ratio is not an artifact of CO depletion; together with the compact millimeter dust disk relative to the gas disk, it is consistent with substantial inward radial drift of millimeter dust. In addition, we find a gas cavity inside 50\,au that encloses the compact millimeter dust disk---the inverse of a typical transition disk---which we attribute to photoevaporative clearing of the inner gas after the pebbles drifted inward. HD~179218 thus provides a clean benchmark for studying the gas mass distribution and gas--dust interaction in protoplanetary disks, free from the CO-depletion biases that affect colder disks.