Related papers: Rotating disks in high-mass young stellar objects
Observations indicate that mass accretion rates onto low-mass protostars are generally lower than the rates of infall to their disks; this suggests that much of the protostellar mass must be accreted during rare, short outbursts of rapid…
Stars and their corresponding protoplanetary disks form in diverse environments. To account for these natural variations, we investigate the formation process around nine solar mass stars with a maximum resolution of 2 AU in a Giant…
We investigate four young, but non-accreting, very low mass stars in Orion, which show irregular eclipses by circumstellar dust. The eclipses are not recurring periodically, are variable in depth, lack a flat bottom, and their duration is…
Evolutionary models of fast-rotating stars show that the stellar rotational velocity may approach the critical speed. Critically rotating stars cannot spin up more, therefore they lose their excess angular momentum through an equatorial…
To better understand the physical properties of accretion disks in high-mass star formation, we present a study of a 12 high-mass accretion disk candidates observed at high spatial resolution with the Australia Telescope Compact Array…
Observations of the Galactic Centre show evidence of disc-like structures of very young stars orbiting the central super-massive black hole within a distance of a few 0.1 pc. While it is widely accepted that about half of the stars form a…
We observed the W51 high-mass star-forming complex with ALMA's longest-baseline configurations, achieving an angular resolution of $\sim$20 milliarcseconds, corresponding to a linear resolution of $\sim$100 au at $D_{\mathrm{W51}}=5.4$ kpc.…
I present models of disk evolution around young binary stars. I show that the primary factor in determining circumbinary disk lifetimes is the rate of disk photoevaporation. I also find that photoevaporative clearing leaves a signature on…
An investigation is made of disk accretion of matter onto a rotating star with an aligned dipole magnetic field. A new aspect of this work is that when the angular velocity of the star and disk differ substantially we argue that the $\bf B$…
Energetic outflows from main sequence stars accreting mass at very high rates might account for the powering of some eruptive objects, such as merging main sequence stars, major eruptions of luminous blue variables, e.g., the Great Eruption…
We are studying the mass distribution in a sample of 50 early type spiral galaxies, with morphological type betweens S0 and Sab and absolute magnitudes M_B between -18 and -22; they form the massive and high-surface brightness extreme of…
Circumstellar disks are expected to form early in the process that leads to the formation of a young star, during the collapse of the dense molecular cloud core. It is currently not well understood at what stage of the collapse the disk is…
Stars can either be formed in or captured by the accretion disks in Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). These AGN stars are irradiated and subject to extreme levels of accretion, which can turn even low-mass stars into very massive ones ($M > 100…
Observations of the dust and gas around embedded stellar clusters reveal some of the processes involved in their formation and evolution. Large scale mass infall with rates dM/dt=4e-4 solar masses/year is found to be disrupted on small…
Young stars and planetary systems form in molecular clouds. For classical T Tauri stars (CTTS, F-K type precursors) the accretion disk does not reach down to the central star, but it is truncated near the co-rotation radius. The inner edge…
The pre-stellar cores in which low mass stars form are generally well magnetized. Our simulations show that early protostellar discs are massive and experience strong magnetic torques in the form of magnetic braking and protostellar…
The fragmentation mode of high-mass molecular clumps and the accretion processes that form the most massive stars ($M\gtrsim 8M_\odot$) are still not well understood. To this end, we have undertaken a large observational program (CORE)…
X-rays trace accretion onto compact objects in binaries with low mass companions at rates ranging up to near Eddington. Accretion at high rates onto neutron stars goes through cycles with time-scales of days to months. At lower average…
Angular momentum is a key property regulating star formation and evolution. However, the physics driving the distribution of the stellar rotation rates of early-type main-sequence stars is as yet poorly understood. Using our catalog of…
We present results from our numerical simulations of collapsing massive molecular cloud cores. These numerical calculations show that massive stars assemble quickly with mass accretion rates exceeding 10^-3 Msol/yr and confirm that the mass…