Protostellar Disk Formation and Angular Momentum Transport During Magnetized Core Collapse

Abstract

Theoretical studies of collapsing clouds have found that even a relatively weak magnetic field may prevent the formation of disks and their fragmentation. However, most previous studies have been limited to cases where the magnetic field and the rotation axis of the cloud are aligned, and very few studies investigated the combined effects of magnetic field and turbulence.

We perform three-dimensional, adaptive mesh, numerical simulations of magnetically supercritical collapsing dense cores in both non-turbulent and turbulent environment.

At variance with earlier analyses, we show that the transport of angular momentum acts less efficiently in collapsing cores with non-aligned rotation and magnetic field. We also show that the turbulence is responsible for a misalignment between the rotation axis and the magnetic field and can diffuse out the magnetic field of the inner regions efficiently. The magnetic braking is therefore reduced, and massive disks can be built. If the disks are massive enough and the magnetization not too strong, fragmentation can occur. These results are presented in details in [7, 8].