Accretion and Formation of Nascent Solar Systems
Abstract
Traditionally, models of the formation and accretion of protostellar systems have considered isolated stars embedded in a small symmetric envelope. However, by using a locally optimized version of the adaptive mesh refinement code RAMSES, we can simultaneously resolve the molecular cloud dynamics and the evolution of the protostellar disk with a dynamic range of more than 4 million. We will present novel results that include the formation and evolution of protostellar systems with realistic in-fall rates and magnetic field structures, consistently determined from the collapse of the molecular cloud core from parsec to sub-AU scales. We demonstrate that the resulting accretion rate to the disk is an unsteady, non-symmetric process, and that the filamentary structure of the molecular cloud prevails to scales of thousands of astronomical units. Finally, because our simulations represent a statistically significant fraction of the interstellar medium with thousands of stars, our results can be compared to observations on a statistically sound basis, and we can account for the cosmic variance in star formation in a natural way, including isolated low mass star formation, binaries, and rich star clusters.
- Publication:
-
Protostars and Planets VI Posters
- Pub Date:
- July 2013
- Bibcode:
- 2013prpl.conf1H004H