CIRCUMVENTING THE RADIATION PRESSURE BARRIER IN THE FORMATION OF MASSIVE STARS VIA DISK ACCRETION

By R. Kuiper, H. Klahr, H. Beuther, Th. Henning. 2010

185 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present radiation hydrodynamic simulations of the collapse of massive pre-stellar cores. We treat frequency-dependent radiative feedback from stellar evolution and accretion luminosity at a numerical resolution down to 1.27 AU. In the 2D approximation of axially symmetric simulations, for the first time it is possible to simulate the whole accretion phase (up to the end of the accretion disk epoch) for a forming massive star and to perform a broad scan of the parameter space. Our simulation series evidently shows the necessity to incorporate the dust sublimation front to preserve the high shielding property of massive accretion disks. While confirming the upper mass limit of spherically symmetric accretion, our disk accretion models show a persistent high anisotropy of the corresponding thermal radiation field. This yields the growth of the highest-mass stars ever formed in multi-dimensional radiation hydrodynamic simulations, far beyond the upper mass limit of spherical accretion. Non-axially symmetric effects are not necessary to sustain accretion. The radiation pressure launches a stable bipolar outflow, which grows in angle with time, as presumed from observations. For an initial mass of the pre-stellar host core of 60, 120, 240, and 480 M☉ the masses of the final stars formed in our simulations add up to 28.2, 56.5, 92.6, and at least 137.2 M☉, respectively.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6948be26c16e13c93ffde623ff0eef0db0c37e2c

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Citations in the corpus

Collapse, outflows and fragmentation of massive, turbulent and magnetized prestellar barotropic cores (2011, methodology): “The impact of radiative feedback on fragmentation has been investigated analytically by Krumholz (2006) and Krumholz & McKee (2008), and numerically by Krumholz et al. (2007, 2010), Bate (2009), Offner et al. (2009), Urban et al. (2010), Kuiper et al. (2010) and Peters et al. (2010abcd).”
THE RED MSX SOURCE SURVEY: THE MASSIVE YOUNG STELLAR POPULATION OF OUR GALAXY (2013, background): “Kuiper et al. (2010) have shown that a full radiative transfer treatment results in their being essentially no limit to the mass of star that can be formed, since the disc effectively self-shields against the star’s radiation pressure.”
FORMATION OF MASSIVE PRIMORDIAL STARS: INTERMITTENT UV FEEDBACK WITH EPISODIC MASS ACCRETION (2015, methodology): “(9) We make use of the Poisson solver developed in Kuiper et al. (2010a), which has been well tested and used with the PLUTO code.”
A spectroscopic survey on the multiplicity of high-mass stars (2012, background): “Both observations of massive circumstellar disks (Shepherd, Claussen & Kurtz 2001; Chini et al. 2004; Cesaroni et al. 2005; Patel et al. 2005; Kraus et al. 2010) and theoretical calculations (Yorke & Sonnhalter 2002; Krumholz et al. 2009; Kuiper et al. 2010) seem to favour the accretion scenario.”
Accretion disks in luminous young stellar objects (2015, background): “This observational result is probably unsettling for theory and simulations that show that radiation pressure does not prevent disk accretion to form stars up to 140 M (Krumholz et al., 2009; Kuiper et al., 2010).”
LIMITING ACCRETION ONTO MASSIVE STARS BY FRAGMENTATION-INDUCED STARVATION (2010, background): “Krumholz et al. (2009) find non-axisymmetric RayleighTaylor instabilities using gray radiation transfer, whereas Kuiper et al. (2010), using frequency-dependent radiation transfer, do not find such instabilities, but nevertheless find strong disk accretion.”
Physical Processes in the Interstellar Medium (2014, background): “Hydrodynamic simulations in two and three dimensions focusing on the transport of non-ionizing radiation strongly support this picture (Yorke & Sonnhalter, 2002; Krumholz et al., 2009; Kuiper et al., 2010, 2011).”
THREE-DIMENSIONAL SIMULATION OF MASSIVE STAR FORMATION IN THE DISK ACCRETION SCENARIO (2011, methodology): “A detailed derivation of the viscosity prescription is given in Kuiper et al. (2010a).”