Dust processing in the terrestrial planet-forming region of the PDS 70 disk

Dust grains in protoplanetary disks are the building blocks of planets. Investigating the dust composition and size, and their variation over time, is crucial for understanding the planet formation process. The PDS 70 disk is so far the only protoplanetary disk with concrete evidence for the presence of young planets. Mid-infrared spectra were obtained for PDS 70 by the Infrared Spectrograph (IRS) on the Spitzer Space Telescope (SST) and the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in 2007 and 2022, respectively. In this work, we investigate the dust mineralogy through a detailed decomposition of the observed mid-infrared spectra. The results show that both the dust size and crystallinity increased by a factor of about two during the two epochs of observation, indicating evident dust processing in the terrestrial planet-forming region of the PDS 70 disk. The dust size (∼ 0.8 µm) and crystallinity (∼ 6%) in the PDS 70 disk are similar to those of other disks, which implies that the two nascent planets, PDS 70b and PDS 70c located at radial distances of ∼ 22 AU and ∼ 34 AU, do not have a significant impact on the dust processing in the inner disk. The flux densities at λ ≿ 16 µm measured by JWST/MIRI are only 60% of those obtained by Spitzer/IRS. Based on self-consistent radiative transfer modeling, we found that such a strong variability in mid-infrared fluxes can be produced by adjustments to the dust density distribution and structure of the inner disk probably induced by planet-disk interaction.