On the Tilting of Protostellar Disks by Resonant Tidal Effects

By S. Lubow, Gordon I. Ogilvie. 2000

134 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We consider the dynamics of a protostellar disk surrounding a star in a circular-orbit binary system. Our aim is to determine whether, if the disk is initially tilted with respect to the plane of the binary orbit, the inclination of the system will increase or decrease with time. The problem is conveniently formulated in the binary frame in which the tidal potential of the companion star is static. We may then consider a steady, flat disk that is aligned with the binary plane and investigate its linear stability with respect to tilting or warping perturbations. The dynamics is controlled by the competing effects of the m = 0 and m = 2 azimuthal Fourier components of the tidal potential. In the presence of dissipation, the m = 0 component causes alignment of the system, while the m = 2 component has the opposite tendency. We find that disks that are sufficiently large, in particular those that extend to their tidal truncation radii, are generally stable and will therefore tend to alignment with the binary plane on a timescale comparable to that found in previous studies. However, the effect of the m = 2 component is enhanced in the vicinity of resonances where the outer radius of the disk is such that the natural frequency of a global bending mode of the disk is equal to twice the binary orbital frequency. Under such circumstances, the disk can be unstable to tilting and acquire a warped shape, even in the absence of dissipation. The outer radius corresponding to the primary resonance is always smaller than the tidal truncation radius. For disks smaller than the primary resonance, the m = 2 component may be able to cause a very slow growth of inclination through the effect of a near resonance that occurs close to the disk center. We discuss these results in the light of recent observations of protostellar disks in binary systems.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Spectroscopy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e4e5edebd751cfda4c63f5ba208063f80ecdf3dd

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Citations in the corpus

Observational implications of precessing protostellar discs and jets (2000, methodology): “(35) This expression for the alignment timescale and the expression for the precession rate (equation 22) have been verified by the numerical calculations of Lubow & Ogilvie (2000).”
Tearing up the disc: misaligned accretion on to a binary (2013, background): “However, discs can communicate angular momentum by propagating waves (e.g. Lubow & Pringle 1993; Papaloizou & Lin 1995; Lubow & Ogilvie 2000).”
THE FORMATION OF LOW-MASS BINARY STAR SYSTEMS VIA TURBULENT FRAGMENTATION (2010, background): “However, this can plausibly be explained via tidal circularization of initially misaligned systems (e.g. Lubow & Ogilvie 2000; Bate et al. 2000), so these binaries may have formed by either turbulent or disk fragmentation.”
Formation of precessing jets by tilted black hole discs in 3D general relativistic MHD simulations (2017, background): “In this wave-like limit, T (r) oscillates in radius at r 20 rg (Demianski & Ivanov 1997; Ivanov & Illarionov 1997; Lubow & Ogilvie 2000; Lubow, Ogilvie & C© 2017 The Author(s) Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society nloaded from https://academ ic.oup.com /m…”
A review of quasi-periodic oscillations from black hole X-ray binaries: Observation and theory (2019, background): “In the opposite, wave-like regime, the linearized equation for angular momentum conservation is essentially the same as the diffusive regime (equation 11), whereas the internal torque obeys [126, 127, 169]”
Precessing warped accretion discs in X‐ray binaries (2000, background): “This is accompanied by dissipation of c© 0000 RAS energy and the disc settles into the binary plane (Lubow & Ogilvie 2000; Bate et al. 2000).”
On the diffusive propagation of warps in thin accretion discs (2010, unknown): “The equations of motion for a wave in the case where the disc is Keplerian and nearly inviscid are (Lubow & Ogilvie 2000; Lubow et al. 2002) ΣR3Ω ∂l ∂t = ∂G ∂R (3) ∂G ∂t + αΩG = ΣR3Ω c2s 4 ∂l ∂R , (4) whereG is the disc internal torque in the horizontal plane (only).”
Phantom: A Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics and Magnetohydrodynamics Code for Astrophysics (2017, background): “H/R the warp propagation is wave-like and no equivalent nonlinear theory exists (see Lubow & Ogilvie, 2000; Lubow et al., 2002).”