Protostars and Planets VI, Heidelberg, July 15-20, 2013
Poster 1H004
Accretion and Formation of Nascent Solar Systems
Haugbølle, Troels (Centre for Star and Planet Formation, University of Copenhagen)
Padoan, Paolo (ICREA & ICC, University of Barcelona)
Küffmeier, Michael (Niels Bohr Institute and Centre for Star and Planet Formation, Univ. of Copenhagen)
Nordlund, Åke (Niels Bohr Institute and Centre for Star and Planet Formation, Univ. of Copenhagen)
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.
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