THE FORMATION OF LOW-MASS BINARY STAR SYSTEMS VIA TURBULENT FRAGMENTATION

By Stella S. R. Offner, K. Kratter, C. Matzner, Mark R. Krumholz, Richard Klein. 2010

158 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We characterize the infall rate onto protostellar systems forming in self-gravitating radiation-hydrodynamics simulations. Using two dimensionless parameters to determine the disks' susceptibility to gravitational fragmentation, we infer limits on protostellar system multiplicity and the mechanism of binary formation. We show that these parameters give robust predictions even in the case of marginally resolved protostellar disks. We find that protostellar systems with radiation feedback predominately form binaries via turbulent fragmentation, not disk instability, and predict that turbulent fragmentation is the dominant channel for binary formation for low-mass stars. We clearly demonstrate that systems forming in simulations including radiative feedback have fundamentally different parameters than those in purely hydrodynamics simulations.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6ce00c2394c20f057129b4a630f9f6e1785dcf81

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

The Close Binary Fraction of Solar-type Stars Is Strongly Anticorrelated with Metallicity (2018, background): “On large scales, turbulent core fragmentation creates binaries originally separated by 1000 s of au (Fisher 2004; Bate 2009b; Offner et al. 2010).”
Collapse, outflows and fragmentation of massive, turbulent and magnetized prestellar barotropic cores (2011, result): “The differences of these studies are not clear yet and could be owing to the initial conditions or the absence of feedback in Stamatellos et al. (2009), as recently suggested by Offner et al. (2010).”
On the diversity and statistical properties of protostellar discs (2018, background): “Offner et al. (2010) studied ∼ 10 discs from Offner et al. (2009), but their main interest was in whether multiple systems formed primarily by core fragmentation or disc fragmentation rather than in the properties of the discs per se.”
THE VLA NASCENT DISK AND MULTIPLICITY SURVEY OF PERSEUS PROTOSTARS (VANDAM). II. MULTIPLICITY OF PROTOSTARS IN THE PERSEUS MOLECULAR CLOUD (2016, background): “…through several possible processes (and combinations thereof): (1) turbulent fragmentation of the molecular cloud (e.g., Padoan & Nordlund 2002; Offner et al. 2010; Bate 2012), (2) the thermal fragmentation of strongly perturbed, rotating, and infalling core (e.g., Inutsuka & Miyama 1992;…”
Gravitational Instabilities in Circumstellar Disks (2016, background): “(47) In a simple core-collapse model one can specify j(t), however it is more realistic to consider the impact of accretion from turbulent filamentary structures that characterize star forming regions (Offner et al. 2010).”