English

Formation of massive stars by growing accretion rate

Astrophysics 2016-08-30 v1

Abstract

We perform calculations of pre-main sequence evolution of stars from 1 to 85M85 M_{\odot} with growing accretion rates M˙\dot{M}. The values of M˙\dot{M} are taken equal to a constant fraction f~\tilde{f} of the rates of the mass outflows observed by Churchwell (\cite{church}) and Henning (\cite{henning2000}). The evolution of the various stellar parameters is given, as well as the evolution of the disc luminosity; electronic tables are provided as a supplement to the articles. Typically, the duration of the accretion phase of massive stars is 3105\simeq 3 \cdot 10^5yr. and there is less than 10% difference in the time necessary to form a 8 or 80M80 M_{\odot} star. If in a young cluster all the proto-stellar cores start to accrete at the same time, we then have a relation M(t)M(t) between the masses of the new stars and the time tt of their appearance. Since we also know the distribution of stellar masses at the end of star formation (IMF), we can derive the star formation history N(t)N(t). Interestingly enough, the current IMF implies two peaks of star formation: low mass stars form first and high mass star form later.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0105054,
  title  = {Formation of massive stars by growing accretion rate},
  author = {R. Behrend and A. Maeder},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0105054},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

9 pages, 9 figures, in press in A&A