Faculty Award for Women - Energetic Winds and Disk Accretionin Low Mass Young Stars

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This faculty award for Women Scientists and Engineers is made to Dr. Suzan Edwards of the Five College Astronomy Department at Smith College. The NSF Faculty Award for Women Scientists and Engineers recognizes the high quality of the awardee's record in teaching and scholarship as well as the potential for continued significant contributions to scientific research, the academic profession, and the education of future scientists. Dr. Edwards will carry out research on energetic winds and disk accretion in low mass young stars. Current observational and theoretical work on star formation suggests that the gravitational collapse of dense, rotating cores in molecular clouds results in an initial configuration of a protostar which is dominated by a flattened spinning disk of roughly solar system dimension. During the first hundred thousand years, the simultaneous processes of mass infall onto the outer part of the disk and accretion of material through the disk and onto the central stellar object are hidden from direct view by the opaque screen provided by dust in the infalling remnant core material. Very early in this process, however, observations show that the protostellar system turns on an energetic bipolar wind. While the driving mechanism for this wind is not yet understood, theoretical arguments suggest that such a wind is required in order for the central object to shed sufficient angular momentum to grow to stellar dimensions. After several hundred thousand years, the energetic wind has removed enough of the remnant infalling core material that the star/energetic wind/accretion disk system becomes optically revealed as a T Tauri "star". A high resolution optical spectroscopic survey of T Tauri systems will be carried out at the 4m telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in a double-pronged study to investigate atomic lines formed in two distinct regions. Data from Observations of spectral lines formed in the energetic winds will be used to probe the wind origin and collimation mechanism, and to better constrain wind mass loss rates. Observations of lines formed in regions where mass accretion onto the stellar surface is occurring will be used to determine whether mass transfer from disk to star is conducted through a classical equatorial boundary layer or whether the stellar magnetic field interrupts the disk and channels disk material along field lines to the stellar surface.