Protoplanetary and debris disks

Details. Protoplanetary disks around newly born stars are the site where planets form through the assembly of growing dust grains. Submm observations with ALMA, sensistive to mm-sized dust grains, have recently  revealed a large variety of disk sub-structures (cavities, rings, spirals) potentially due to the gravitational interaction with planets in many young sources, which suggest that planet formation occurs very rapidly. Optical and NIR observations of the disks, which are sensitive to micron-sized grains, provide highly complementary data to those of ALMA that can be efficiently used to constrain the mutual interplay between small dust (and therefore gas since these components are well coupled), large dust, and forming planets. In this respect, the Taurus-Auriga star-forming region that will be investigated by SHARK-VIS and SHARK-NIR is a perfect laboratory to carry out a census of very young disks (1-2 Myr). We expect that these observations will reveal the morphology of many disks and link the observed substructures to the presence of sub-stellar and/or planetary companions, hopefully even directly detected by the SHARKs themselves. Additional targets, but on the final end of disk evolution, are debris disks, which correspond to the final evolutionary stage of circumstellar disks around young stars. Debris disks are almost totally composed of dust, which is continuously regenerated through collisions of planetesimals. Resolved images of debris disks in scattered light with SHARK-VIS will allow us to identify specific structures (e.g. rings, warps, asymmetries) that are possibly the imprints of unseen planets (not otherwise detectable) and thus provide crucial insights into the evolution of planetary systems.