Self-gravitating disc candidates around massive young stars

Abstract

There have been several recent detections of candidate Keplerian discs around massive young protostars. Given the relatively large disc-to-star mass ratios in these systems, and their young ages, it is worth investigating their propensity to becoming self-gravitating. To this end, we compute self-consistent, semi-analytic models of putative self-gravitating discs for five candidate disc systems. Our aim is not to fit exactly the observations, but to demonstrate that the expected dust continuum emission from marginally unstable self-gravitating discs can be quite weak, due to high optical depth at the midplane even at millimetre wavelengths. In the best cases, the models produce "observable" disc masses within a factor of <1.5 of those observed, with midplane dust temperatures comparable to measured temperatures from molecular line emission. We find in two cases that a self-gravitating disc model compares well with observations. If these discs are self-gravitating, they satisfy the conditions for disc fragmentation in their outer regions. These systems may hence have as-yet-unresolved low mass stellar companions, and are thus promising targets for future high angular resolution observations.

9 pages, 20 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS

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• Parameter study for the burst mode of accretion in massive star formation
• Modeling the accretion disk around the high-mass protostar GGD 27-MM1
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• Exploring the RCrA environment with SPHERE: Discovery of a new stellar companion
• The Effect of Protoplanetary Disk Cooling Times on the Formation of Gas Giant Planets by Gravitational Instability
• ALMA observations of the Extended Green Object G19.01$-$0.03: I. A Keplerian disc in a massive protostellar system
• Constraining planet formation around 6$M_{\odot }$-8$M_{\odot }$ stars
• A Multi-Scale Picture of Magnetic Field and Gravity from Large-Scale Filamentary Envelope to Core-Accreting Dust Lanes in the High-Mass Star-Forming Region W51
• The burst mode of accretion in massive star formation with stellar inertia
• Self-gravitating planetary envelopes and the core-nucleated instability
• Pebble accretion in self-gravitating protostellar discs