Hungry Young Stars: A New Explanation for the FU Ori Outbursts

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Materials presented at a Press Conference at the 207th AAS Meeting, Washington, DC, January 11, 2006.

For release: 12:30 pm EST, January 11, 2006.
For further information contact Shantanu Basu or Eduard Vorobyov.

Presented Materials and Media Coverage:





  1. Hungry Young Stars: A New Explanation for the FU Ori Outbursts - Press Conference Talk (ppt file), 207th AAS Meeting, Washington, DC, January 11, 2006.

  2. Animation of Disk Evolution (avi file), presented in Press Conference talk, 207th AAS Meeting, Washington, DC, January 11, 2006.

  3. "Hungry Young Stars: A New Explanation for the FU Ori Outbursts - Press Release (HTML)" , 207th AAS Meeting, Washington, DC, January 11, 2006.

  4. "Hungry Young Stars: A New Explanation for the FU Ori Outbursts - Press Release (Word file)" , 207th AAS Meeting, Washington, DC, January 11, 2006.

  5. "Hungry Young Stars: A New Explanation for the FU Ori Outbursts - Press Release (pdf file)" , 207th AAS Meeting, Washington, DC, January 11, 2006.

  6. Figure 1 in Press Release , 207th AAS Meeting, Washington, DC, January 11, 2006.

  7. Figure 2 in Press Release , 207th AAS Meeting, Washington, DC, January 11, 2006.

  8. Article in Western News, January 2006.

Animation of the Disk Evolution:
Note: This animation loads automatically in Internet Explorer, but may not load properly in Mozilla/Firefox. A copy of the animation may be downloaded from here.


UPPER PANEL: The gas surface density map in log scale. The red circle in the center represents the central protostar. The development of spiral structure in the protostellar disk is evident. Dense protostellar/protoplanetary embryos form within the spiral arms and are driven into the protostar by the action of gravitational torques.

LOWER PANEL: The mass accretion rate onto the protostar as a function of time. The mass accretion rate is characterized by very short (<100 yr) but vigorous (1-10 x 10-4 Msun/yr) accretion bursts, which are intervened with longer periods (~1000 yr) of quiescent accretion. Note that bursts of mass accretion are correlated with the embryo infall in the upper panel.

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