Protostellar mass accretion rates from gravoturbulent fragmentation
Astrophysikalisches Institut Potsdam, An der Sternwarte 16, 14482 Potsdam, Germany e-mail: sschmeja;rklessen@aip.de
Corresponding author: S. Schmeja, sschmeja@aip.de
Received:
19
September
2003
Accepted:
4
February
2004
We analyse protostellar mass accretion rates 
from numerical models of star formation based on gravoturbulent
fragmentation, considering a large number of different environments.
To within one order of magnitude, 
with 
being the mean thermal Jeans mass and 
the corresponding free-fall time.
However, mass accretion rates are highly time-variant,
with a sharp peak shortly after the formation of the protostellar core.
We present an empirical exponential fit formula to describe the time evolution
of the mass accretion and discuss the resulting fit parameters.
There is a positive correlation between the peak accretion rate
and the final mass of the protostar. We also investigate the
relation of with the turbulent flow velocity as well as
with the driving wavenumbers in different environments. We then
compare our results with other theoretical models of star
formation and with observational data.
Key words: hydrodynamics / accretion, accretion disks / stars: formation / ISM: kinematics and dynamics / methods: numerical
© ESO, 2004