Initial Conditions of Planet Formation: Lifetimes of Primordial Disks

The statistical properties of circumstellar disks around young stars are important for constraining theoretical models for the formation and early evolution of planetary systems. In this brief review, I survey the literature related to ground-based and Spitzer-based infrared (IR) studies of young stellar clusters, with particular emphasis on tracing the evolution of primordial (“protoplanetary”) disks through spectroscopic and photometric diagnostics. The available data demonstrate that the fraction of young stars with optically thick primordial disks and/or those which show spectroscopic evidence for accretion appears to approximately follow an exponential decay with characteristic time ∼2.5 Myr (half-life ≃ 1.7 Myr). Large IR surveys of ∼2–5 Myr-old stellar samples show that there is real cluster-by-cluster scatter in the observed disk fractions as a function of age. Recent Spitzer surveys have found convincing evidence that disk evolution varies by stellar mass and environment (binarity, proximity to massive stars, and cluster density). Perhaps most significantly for understanding the planeticity of stars, the disk fraction decay timescale appears to vary by stellar mass, ranging from ∼1 Myr for >1.3 M⊙ stars to ∼3 Myr for <0.08 M⊙ brown dwarfs. The exponential decay function may provide a useful empirical formalism for estimating very rough ages for YSO populations and for modeling the effects of disk-locking on the angular momentum of young stars.