Abstract

Contributed Talk - Splinter Computation

Thursday, 24 September 2020, 12:35   (virtual room B)

Effects of resolution on disk fragmentation in the context of massive star formation

G. André Oliva and Rolf Kuiper
Universität Tübingen

In this talk, we present the highest-resolution three-dimensional radiation-hydrodynamical simulations to date of a fragmenting accretion disk in the context of massive star formation. The simulations are performed on a grid in spherical coordinates with a logarithmic spacing of the grid cells in the radial direction and a cosine-distribution of the grid cells in the polar direction, focusing the spatial resolution on the disk midplane. Because of that, roughly 25% of the total number of grid cells, corresponding to ~ 26 million grid cells, are used to model the disk physics. The simulations start from a collapsing cloud of radius 0.1 pc, and 200 solar masses, and they include hydrodynamics, irradiation from the central massive protostar, dust and gas (re-)emission, dust sublimation and evaporation and stellar evolution. The fragmenting disk forms due to angular momentum conservation during the first 4 kyr of evolution. In this study, we focus on the fragments formed and their possibilities to form companion stars, as well as how the results change with resolution. For the latter, we ran the same setup with varying resolutions, and determine the minimum resolution required for resolving the Jeans length.