Published September 10, 2015 | Version v1
Journal article

Bimodality of circumstellar disk evolution induced by the Hall current

  • 1. Laboratory of Computational Astrophysics, RIKEN, Saitama (Japan)
  • 2. Department of Physics, Nagoya University, Aichi (Japan)
  • 3. Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo (Japan)
  • 4. Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Kyushu University, Fukuoka (Japan)

Description

The formation process of circumstellar disks is still controversial because of the interplay of complex physical processes that occurs during the gravitational collapse of prestellar cores. In this study, we investigate the effect of the Hall current term on the formation of the circumstellar disk using three-dimensional simulations. In our simulations, all non-ideal effects, as well as the radiation transfer, are considered. The size of the disk is significantly affected by a simple difference in the inherent properties of the prestellar core, namely whether the rotation vector and the magnetic field are parallel or anti-parallel. In the former case, only a very small disk ( < 1 A U ) is formed. On the other hand, in the latter case, a massive and large ( > 20 A U ) disk is formed in the early phase of protostar formation. Since the parallel and anti-parallel properties do not readily change, we expect that the parallel and anti-parallel properties are also important in the subsequent disk evolution and the difference between the two cases is maintained or enhanced. This result suggests that the disk size distribution of the Class 0 young stellar objects is bimodal. Thus, the disk evolution can be categorized into two cases and we may call the parallel and anti-parallel systems Ortho-disk and Para-disk, respectively. We also show that the anti-rotating envelopes against the disk rotation appear with a size of 200 A U . We predict that the anti-rotating envelope will be found in the future observations.

Availability note (English)

Available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/2041-8205/810/2/L26

Additional details

Identifiers

Publishing Information

Journal Title
Astrophysical Journal Letters
Journal Volume
810
Journal Issue
2
Journal Page Range
[5 p.]
ISSN
2041-8205