The Effects of Radiative Transfer on Low-Mass Star Formation
Forming stars emit a substantial amount of radiation into their natal environment. We use ORION, an adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) three-dimensional gravito-radiation-hydrodyanics code, to simulate low-mass star formation in a turbulent molecular cloud. We compare the distributions of stellar masses...
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Published in | The Astrophysical journal Vol. 703; no. 1; pp. 131 - 149 |
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Main Authors | , , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
Bristol
IOP Publishing
20.09.2009
IOP |
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Forming stars emit a substantial amount of radiation into their natal environment. We use ORION, an adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) three-dimensional gravito-radiation-hydrodyanics code, to simulate low-mass star formation in a turbulent molecular cloud. We compare the distributions of stellar masses, accretion rates, and temperatures in the cases with and without radiative transfer, and we demonstrate that radiative feedback has a profound effect on accretion, multiplicity, and mass by reducing the number of stars formed and the total rate at which gas turns into stars. We also show that once the star formation reaches a steady state, protostellar radiation is by far the dominant source of energy in the simulation, exceeding viscous dissipation and compressional heating by at least an order of magnitude. Calculations that omit radiative feedback from protstars significantly underestimate the gas temperature and the strength of this effect. Although heating from protostars is mainly confined to the protostellar cores, we find that it is sufficient to suppress disk fragmentation that would otherwise result in very low-mass companions or brown dwarfs. We demonstrate that the mean protostellar accretion rate increases with the final stellar mass so that the star formation time is only a weak function of mass. |
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Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-2 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-1 content type line 23 |
ISSN: | 0004-637X 1538-4357 |
DOI: | 10.1088/0004-637X/703/1/131 |