On the diversity and statistical properties of protostellar discs

By Matthew R. Bate. 2018

214 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present results from the first population synthesis study of protostellar discs. We analyse the evolution and properties of a large sample of protostellar discs formed in a radiation hydrodynamical simulation of star cluster formation. Due to the chaotic nature of the star formation process, we find an enormous diversity of young protostellar discs, including misaligned discs, and discs whose orientations vary with time. Star-disc interactions truncate discs and produce multiple systems. Discs may be destroyed in dynamical encounters and/or through ram-pressure stripping, but reform by later gas accretion. We quantify the distributions of disc mass and radii for protostellar ages up to $\approx 10^5$ yrs. For low-mass protostars, disc masses tend to increase with both age and protostellar mass. Disc radii range from of order ten to a few hundred au, grow in size on timescales $\le 10^4$ yr, and are smaller around lower-mass protostars. The radial surface density profiles of isolated protostellar discs are flatter than the minimum mass solar nebula model, typically scaling as $\Sigma \propto r^{-1}$. Disc to protostar mass ratios rarely exceed two, with a typical range of $M_{\rm d}/M_* = 0.1-1$ to ages $\le 10^4$ yrs and decreasing thereafter. We quantify the relative orientation angles of circumstellar discs and the orbit of bound pairs of protostars, finding a preference for alignment that strengths with decreasing separation. We also investigate how the orientations of the outer parts of discs differ from the protostellar and inner disc spins for isolated protostars and pairs.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Spectroscopy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ba0cf564622ee9ae61968ce6e8a1ddee592f434e

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Citations in the corpus

Compact Disks in a High-resolution ALMA Survey of Dust Structures in the Taurus Molecular Cloud (2019, background): “However, the disk formation process remains unclear, with complications from initial angular momentum distribution, magnetohydrodynamic structure, and turbulence (Li et al. 2014; Tsukamoto et al. 2018; Bate 2018).”
The Close Binary Fraction of Solar-type Stars Is Strongly Anticorrelated with Metallicity (2018, background): “Moreover, because accretion is likely stochastic, driven by nonuniform turbulent molecular clouds, not all solar-type stars of the same metallicity experienced the same accretion history (Nguyen et al. 2009; Cody et al. 2014; Bate 2018).”
The VLA/ALMA Nascent Disk and Multiplicity (VANDAM) Survey of Orion Protostars. II. A Statistical Characterization of Class 0 and Class I Protostellar Disks (2020, methodology): “The disk radius measured by Bate (2018) corresponds to the point where 63% of the mass is enclosed, which may be smaller than the Gaussian 2σ used for measuring the sizes of protostellar disks from dust emission.”