Primordial or Secondary? Testing Models of Debris Disk Gas with ALMA

The origin and evolution of gas in debris disks are still not well understood. Secondary gas production from cometary material or a primordial origin have been proposed. So far, observations have mostly concentrated on CO, with only a few C observations available. We overview the C and CO content of debris disk gas and test state-of-the-art models. We use new and archival Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations of CO and C i emission, complemented by C ii data from Herschel, for a sample of 14 debris disks. This expands the number of disks with ALMA measurements of both CO and C i by 10 disks. We present new detections of C i emission toward three disks: HD 21997, HD 121191, and HD 121617. We use a simple disk model to derive gas masses and column densities. We find that current state-of-the-art models of secondary gas production overpredict the C⁰ content of debris disk gas. This does not rule out a secondary origin, but might indicate that the models require an additional C removal process. Alternatively, the gas might be produced in transient events rather than a steady-state collisional cascade. We also test a primordial gas origin by comparing our results to a simplified thermochemical model. This yields promising results, but more detailed work is required before a conclusion can be reached. Our work demonstrates that the combination of C and CO data is a powerful tool to advance our understanding of debris disk gas.