Abstract Understanding how material accretes onto the rotationally supported disk from the surrounding envelope of gas and dust in the youngest protostellar systems is important for describing how disks are formed. Magnetohydrodynamic simulations of magnetized, turbulent disk formation usually show spiral-like streams of material (accretion flows) connecting the envelope to the disk. However, accretion flows in these early stages of protostellar formation still remain poorly characterized, due to their low intensity, and possibly some extended structures are disregarded as being part of the outflow cavity. We use ALMA archival data of a young Class 0 protostar, Lupus 3-MMS, to uncover four extended accretion flow–like structures in C 18 O that follow the edges of the outflows. We make various types of position–velocity cuts to compare with the outflows and find the extended structures are not consistent with the outflow emission, but rather more consistent with a simple infall model. We then use a dendrogram algorithm to isolate five substructures in position–position–velocity space. Four out of the five substructures fit well (>95%) with our simple infall model, with specific angular momenta between 2.7–6.9 × 10 −4 km s −1 pc and mass-infall rates of 0.5–1.1 × 10 −6 M ⊙ yr −1 . Better characterization of the physical structure in the supposed “outflow cavities” is important to disentangle the true outflow cavities and accretion flows.
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Anisotropic Infall and Substructure Formation in Embedded Disks
The filamentary nature of accretion streams found around embedded sources suggests that protostellar disks experience heterogenous infall from the star-forming environment, consistent with the accretion behavior onto star-forming cores in top-down star-cluster formation simulations. This may produce disk substructures in the form of rings, gaps, and spirals that continue to be identified by high-resolution imaging surveys in both embedded Class 0/I and later Class II sources. We present a parameter study of anisotropic infall, informed by the properties of accretion flows onto protostellar cores in numerical simulations, and varying the relative specific angular momentum of incoming flows as well as their flow geometry. Our results show that anisotropic infall perturbs the disk and readily launches the Rossby wave instability. It forms vortices at the inner and outer edges of the infall zone where material is deposited. These vortices drive spiral waves and angular momentum transport, with some models able to drive stresses corresponding to a viscosity parameter on the order of
- Award ID(s):
- 1815461
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10364447
- Publisher / Repository:
- DOI PREFIX: 10.3847
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The Astrophysical Journal
- Volume:
- 928
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 0004-637X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: Article No. 92
- Size(s):
- ["Article No. 92"]
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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