EPoS Contribution
EPoS Contribution
Protostellar disk formation and evolution: the influence of stellar mass and environment

Kaitlin Kratter
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Protostellar disks play a critical role in the birth of a stellar system, and are responsible for transporting the mass and angular momentum from which new stars are born. At early times when most of the mass is accreted, gravitational instabilities are the dominant mechanism for transport and fragmentation in the disk. Using semi-analytic models, we explore disk behavior across a spectrum of system masses and environments, making concrete predictions for disk properties that will be testable by ALMA and the EVLA. We calibrate and test our analytic models with numerical experiments and show that most systems can be well described in terms of two dimensionless numbers which map well onto the parameter space of mass and formation environment.