Talk by Rolf Kuiper on Accretion and Feedback in the Formation of the Most Massive Stars

9. April 2018

On Wednesday, April 11, Dr. Rolf Kuiper from the University of Tübingen will visit the PSO group. He will give a talk on “Accretion and Feedback in the Formation of the Most Massive Stars” at 11am in the Ada Lovelace seminar room.

Abstract:
In the course of their accretion phase, massive (proto)stars impact their natal environment in a variety of feedback effects such as thermal heating, MHD-driven protostellar outflows, radiation forces, and photoionization. Here, I present our most recent simulation results in terms of the relative strength of the feedback components and the size of the reservoir from which the forming stars gain their masses. For the first time, these simulations include all of the feedback effects mentioned above which allows us to shed light on the physical reason for the upper mass limit of present-day stars.
Furthermore, we predict the fragmentation of massive circumstellar accretion disks as a viable road to the formation of spectroscopic massive binaries and the recently observed strong accretion bursts in high-mass star forming regions.
To advertise our latest code development, I might also give a brief overview of the most recent results obtained in a variety of other astrophysical research fields from the formation of embedded Super-Earth planets’ first atmospheres (Cimerman et al. 2017, MNRAS) to the formation of the progenitors of the first supermassive black holes in the early universe (Hirano et al. 2017, Science).

About HITS

HITS, the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies, was established in 2010 by physicist and SAP co-founder Klaus Tschira (1940-2015) and the Klaus Tschira Foundation as a private, non-profit research institute. HITS conducts basic research in the natural, mathematical, and computer sciences. Major research directions include complex simulations across scales, making sense of data, and enabling science via computational research. Application areas range from molecular biology to astrophysics. An essential characteristic of the Institute is interdisciplinarity, implemented in numerous cross-group and cross-disciplinary projects. The base funding of HITS is provided by the Klaus Tschira Foundation.

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