Modeling the Formation of Disks of Gas and Dust Around Young Stars

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This astronomy project will use computer models to understand how disks of gas and dust form around very young stars. It is from these disks that planets, like Earth and the other planets in our Solar System, are formed. There is now strong evidence that most, if not all, stars in our Galaxy have their own system of planets. The team at the University of Virginia will use sophisticated computer code that they have been working with for many years to study this process. They will include the effects of "magnetic fields" and "turbulence" in their models. Both are thought to be important processes in space, especially in the large clouds that we know lie between the stars. These clouds collapse under their own weight to form stars and planets. A graduate and an undergraduate student will be involved in this project. The investigators will produce animated movies of disk formation for use in large introductory astronomy classes for non-science majors and will develop activities for a mobile planetarium as part of the "Dark Skies, Bright Kids" program, a science educational activity that targets elementary school students in rural Albemarle County, Virginia.Star-forming cores are observed to be significantly magnetized and magnetic braking has been shown to be capable of suppressing disk formation, leading to the so-called magnetic braking catastrophe. The goal of the proposed program is to determine whether the two leading candidates for averting the catastrophe, non-ideal magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) effects and turbulence, can allow the planet-forming disks to form in the presence of a realistic magnetic field, and whether such disks satisfy the increasingly tight observational constraints set by recent ALMA observations. The proposers will use and further develop a well-tested MHD code known as ZeusTW. In the second part of the project they will use the ENZO adaptive mesh refinement MHD code to synthesize disk formation in isolated cores and in clusters.