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REVIEW article

Front. Astron. Space Sci.
Sec. Local Universe
Volume 11 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fspas.2024.1403075
This article is part of the Research Topic Star Formation: Numerical Simulations And What They Teach Us View all 6 articles

Magnetohydrodynamical modeling of star-disk formation: from isolated spherical collapse towards incorporation of external dynamics

Provisionally accepted
  • Niels Bohr Institute, Faculty of Natural and Life Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The formation of protostars and their disks has been understood as the result of the gravitational collapse phase of an accumulation of dense gas that determines the mass reservoir of the stardisk system. Against this background, the broadly applied scenario of considering the formation of disks has been to model the collapse of a dense core assuming spherical spherical symmetry.Our understanding of the formation of star-disk systems is currently undergoing a reformation though. The picture evolves from interpreting disks as the sole outcome of the collapse of an isolated prestellar core to a more dynamic picture where disks are affected by the molecular cloud environment in which they form. In this review, we provide a status report of the state-of-the-art of spherical collapse models that are highly advanced in terms of the incorporated physics together with constraints from models that account for the possibility of infall onto star-disk systems in simplified test setups, as well as in multi-scale simulations that cover a dynamical range from the Giant Molecular Cloud environment down to the disk. Considering the observational constraints that favor a more dynamical picture of star formation, we finally discuss the challenges and prospects in linking the efforts of tackle the problem of star-disk formation in combined multi-scale, multi-physics simulations.

    Keywords: Star formation, (magneto-)hydrodynamics, disk formation phase, non-ideal MHD, Infall, accretion

    Received: 18 Mar 2024; Accepted: 26 Jun 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Kuffmeier. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Michael Kuffmeier, Niels Bohr Institute, Faculty of Natural and Life Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

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