English

Protostellar collapse: regulation of the angular momentum and onset of an ionic precursor

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2020-09-04 v1 Astrophysics of Galaxies

Abstract

Through the magnetic braking and the launching of protostellar outflows, magnetic fields play a major role in the regulation of angular momentum in star formation, which directly impacts the formation and evolution of protoplanetary disks and binary systems. The aim of this paper is to quantify those phenomena in the presence of non-ideal magnetohydrodynamics effects, namely the Ohmic and ambipola r diffusion. We perform three-dimensional simulations of protostellar collapses varying the mass of the prestellar dense core, the thermal support (the α\alpha ratio) and the dust grain size-distribu tion. The mass mostly influences the magnetic braking in the pseudo-disk, while the thermal support impacts the accretion rate and hence the properties of the disk. Removing the grains smaller than 0. 1 μ\mum in the Mathis, Rumpl, Nordsieck (MRN) distribution enhances the ambipolar diffusion coefficient. Similarly to previous studies, we find that this change in the distribution reduces the magnet ic braking with an impact on the disk. The outflow is also significantly weakened. In either case, the magnetic braking largely dominates the outflow as a process to remove the angular momentum from t he disk. Finally, we report a large ionic precursor to the outflow with velocities of several km s1^{-1}, which may be observable.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2009.01268,
  title  = {Protostellar collapse: regulation of the angular momentum and onset of an ionic precursor},
  author = {Pierre Marchand and Kengo Tomida and Kei Tanaka and Benoît Commerçon and Gilles Chabrier},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.01268},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

20 pages, 16 figures, Accepted in ApJ