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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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Astrophysical journal 2009-09, Vol.703 (1), p.131-149
Main Authors: Offner, Stella S. R, Klein, Richard I, McKee, Christopher F, Krumholz, Mark R
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Astronomy
ASTROPHYSICS, COSMOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY
Earth, ocean, space
ENERGY TRANSFER
Exact sciences and technology
FLUID MECHANICS
HEAT TRANSFER
HYDRODYNAMICS
MASS
MECHANICS
MULTIPLICITY
PROTOSTARS
RADIANT HEAT TRANSFER
SIMULATION
STARS
STEADY-STATE CONDITIONS
TURBULENCE
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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.
ISSN:0004-637X
1538-4357
DOI:10.1088/0004-637X/703/1/131