Radiative Transfer Simulations: Low-Mass Cores, Disks, and Protostars
First Author:
Stella Offner
Email: soffner AT berkeley.edu
UC Berkeley
727b Campbell Hall, Astronomy Department
Berkeley, CA, 94720
Coauthors:
Offner, Stella, UC Berkeley
Klein, Richard, UC Berkeley; LLNL
McKee, Christopher, UC Berkeley
Chakrabarti, Sukanya, Center for Astrophysics
Abstract
Although radiative feedback is a key element in star formation, few simulations have included radiation transfer and studied its effects. Using the ORION adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) code, we simulate low-mass star formation in a turbulent molecular cloud. The 3D hydrodynamic simulations include both self-gravity and gray radiative transfer. We compare the distribution of stellar masses, accretion rates, and disk properties in the cases with and without radiation feedback. We find that the influence of radiative heating is mainly confined to a few thousand AU around the source. However, an increase of only a factor of two in gas temperature is sufficient to suppress disk fragmentation that would otherwise result in very low-mass stars or brown dwarfs. Finally, we present spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of the sources calculated with the Monte Carlo radiative transfer code RADISHE. We compare these with SEDs of low-mass embedded protostars observed with Spitzer.
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