http://arxiv.org/abs/1611.10360
Protoplanetary disks form around stars as a consequence of pre-stellar cores collapsing in filaments of Giant Molecular Clouds, which makes them the smallest entity in a hierarchy of scales. Length scales range from tens of parsecs for Giant Molecular Clouds to protoplanetary disk sizes $\sim 10$ AU to $\sim 100$ AU. It is computationally very challenging to cover such a broad range of scales in a single simulation. Therefore, simulations of protostellar formation traditionally start from initial conditions representing a collapsing spherically symmetric cloud, as an approximation for the pre-stellar core. This approach allows detailed parameter studies, but neglecting the underlying turbulence in Giant Molecular Clouds and the potential interactions with the surroundings could potentially limit the applicability of such idealized initial conditions. Considering the Giant Molecular Cloud dynamics is important to investigate the protostellar formation process in a statistically unbiased sample of initial conditions. Fortunately, relevant spatial as well as temporal scales for large scale dynamics are larger than for smaller domains due to Larson’s velocity law. Using extreme adaptive mesh refinement we carry out simulations with a maximal resolution of 2 AU around single protostars properly anchored in a 40 pc model of GMC using a modified version of the \ramses\ code to solve the equations of ideal magnetohydrodynamics including microphysics and a sub-grid sink particle representation of protostars. In this study, we present for the first time the formation process around nine different solar mass stars embedded in their large-scale environment determined by Giant Molecular Cloud dynamics. We find that protostellar accretion including the formation of protoplanetary disks is a heterogeneous process due to the different protostellar environments.
M. Kuffmeier, T. Haugbolle and %7B. Nordlund
Thu, 1 Dec 16
21/75
Comments: 20 pages, 31 figures
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