Jactos em objectos estelares jovens: o que nos dizem as simulações?

Cooperação Portugal/França Programa Pessoa 2012/2013 (FCT Proc.º 441.00 França)

Principal investigator
João J. G. Lima

Jets and collimated outflows are elongated plasma structures, usually bipolar, associated with accretion disks around the central Young Stellar Object (YSO, hereafter). Through the accretion mechanism from where they originate, jets are the result of a complex magnetohydrodymanic (MHD, hereafter) and radiative process of the collapsing of part of the surrounding molecular cloud.

The development of new challenging observational projects at all wavelengths will give massive information on jets gaining a resolution with orders of magnitude higher than previously. Precise modeling is thus required to face this avalanche of new data. Jets can be modeled analytically, numerically or experimentally.

Jets form YOS's like T Tauri stars achieve a few hundreds of kilometers per second. In terms of spatial scales they range from tens to hundreds of au. They have long been studied not only because they are observed but also because they play a crucial role in removing angular momentum in accreting or collapsing astrophysical objects. This last point is still a pending problem in accretion disks and for the spinning down of stars. We have recently explore this issue analytically and want to confirm that issue numerically.

Based on our long and past experience in analytical modeling, we want to perform advanced numerical simulations. We aim at both testing and combining analytical solutions of stellar jets and disk winds to study the jet formation and its stability. We have already started multi-component jet simulations using AMRVAC and PLUO. We will take advantage of the analytical solutions to construct more realistic initial configurations.

We want to take advantage of a new growing numerical group in Paris to develop YOS jet simulations with the University of Porto where we have access both to observational data analysis and the possibility to make emitting emission maps of our simulations.

Portuguese Node: CAUP
Co-PI: João Lima

French Node: Laboratoire Univers et Théories (LUTH)
Co-PI:Christophe Sauty

Funding institution
Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia

Start: 1 January 2012
End: 30 June 2014