2024A&A...689L...5M

Context. Planets form in the disks surrounding young stars. The time at which the planet formation process begins is still an open question. Annular substructures such as rings and gaps in disks are intertwined with planet formation, and thus their presence or absence is commonly used to investigate the onset of this process.
Aims. Current observations show that a limited number of disks surrounding protostars exhibit annular substructures, all of them in the Class I stage. The lack of observed features in most of these sources may indicate a late emergence of substructures, but it could also be an artifact of these disks being optically thick. To mitigate the problem of optical depth, we investigated substructures within a very young Class 0 disk characterized by low inclination using observations at longer wavelengths.
Methods. We used 3 mm ALMA observations tracing dust emission at a resolution of 7 au to search for evidence of annular substructures in the disk around the deeply embedded Class 0 protostar Oph A SM1.
Results. The observations reveal a nearly face-on disk (inclination ∼ 16°) extending up to 40 au. The radial intensity profile shows a clear deviation from a smooth profile near 30 au, which we interpret as the presence of either a gap at 28 au or a ring at 34 au with Gaussian widths of $ \sigma=1.4^{+2.3}_{-1.2} $ au and $ \sigma=3.9^{+2.0}_{-1.9} $ au, respectively. Crucially, the 3 mm emission at the location of the possible gap or ring is determined to be optically thin, precluding the possibility that this feature in the intensity profile is due to the emission being optically thick.
Conclusions. Annular substructures resembling those in the more evolved Class I and II disks could indeed be present in the Class 0 stage, which is earlier than suggested by previous observations. Similar observations of embedded disks in which the high-optical-depth problem can be mitigated are clearly needed to better constrain the onset of substructures in the embedded stages.