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

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).