Modeling protostellar disks in different environments
Michael Kueffmeier
Friday December 7th, 10:00
Stars predominantly occur clustered among other stars embedded in Giant Molecular Clouds. Contrary to models of individual stars forming due to the collapse of one isolated core, we account for the molecular cloud environment during the epoch of star and protoplanetary disk formation. Using state-of-the art zoom-simulations with the magnetohydrodynamical codes RAMSES, we investigate the accretion process of young stars that are embedded in such different environments during their first ~100 kyr after formation. Starting initially from a turbulent (40 pc)^3 Giant Molecular Cloud, efficient use of the Adaptive Mesh Refinement technique allows us to resolve the processes inside of protoplanetary disks with a resolution down to 0.06 AU, thus covering a range of spatial scales of more than eight orders of magnitude. We find that the accretion process of stars is heterogeneous in space, time and among different protostars with a tendency of more violent accretion for deeply embedded objects. We show that large-scale infall can trigger accretion bursts and thus cause enhanced protostellar luminosities. Apart from that, even infall of relatively little mass compared to the hosting star onto the young disk may significantly enhance the mass budget for planets forming in these disks. To follow-up on this, we evolve the embedded star-disk systems further in time with the new code framework DISPATCH to constrain the effect of infalling material before and during the onset of planet formation. First results of these attempts will be shown and discussed in this contribution.