Dr Justyn Cambell-White from the project team will be doing a talk hosted by the Astronomical Society of Edinburgh. This will be in person and streamed online.
7.30-9.30, 5 November 2021
Augustine United Church, 41 George IV Bridge, Edinburgh, EH1 1EL
Low- and intermediate-mass stars acquire most of their mass in the protostellar phase, but accretion continues into the pre-main-sequence phase via a disk for a few million years. Accretion is a fundamentally important process, affecting disk stability/evolution, stellar rotation/activity, and planet formation/migration. The main observational challenge is probing the sub-au scales of the innermost disk, not yet possible for most of these stars, even via interferometry. Such young stars, however, possess a wealth of high-energy emission lines, revealing the nature of these accretion-related processes.
During my current position at the University of Dundee, I have developed the Python package, STAR-MELT, to automatically extract, identify, and fit emission lines, directly from the input spectral data. These lines can then be used to investigate the accretion activity and its temporal variability, allowing us to tomographically map the structures and inner disk of the stars.
In this talk, I will present an overview of our analysis method and the STAR-MELT package, along with results from our recently published paper that features analyses of three YSOs. We find that even with similar stellar parameters, the accretion processes and the final stages of star formation can be vastly different in terms of stability and nature
More information on the Astronomical Society of Edinburgh site here.
