The Mass Evolution of Protostellar Disks and Envelopes in the Perseus Molecular Cloud

Abstract

In the standard picture for low-mass star formation, a dense molecular cloud undergoes gravitational collapse to form a protostellar system consisting of a new central star, a circumstellar disk, and a surrounding envelope of remaining material. The mass distribution of the system evolves as matter accretes from the large-scale envelope through the disk and onto the protostar. While this general picture is supported by simulations and indirect observational measurements, the specific timescales related to disk growth and envelope dissipation remain poorly constrained. In this paper we conduct a rigorous test of a method introduced by Jørgensen et al. (2009) to obtain mass measurements of disks and envelopes around embedded protostars with observations that do not resolve the disk (resolution of $\sim$1000\,AU). Using unresolved data from the recent Mass Assembly of Stellar Systems and their Evolution with the SMA (MASSES) survey, we derive disk and envelope mass estimates for $59$ protostellar systems in the Perseus molecular cloud. We compare our results to independent disk mass measurements from the VLA Nascent Disk and Multiplicity (VANDAM) survey and find a strong linear correlation, suggesting that accurate disk masses can be measured from unresolved observations. Then, leveraging the size of the MASSES sample, we find no significant trend in protostellar mass distribution as a function of age, as approximated from bolometric temperatures. These results may indicate that the disk mass of a protostar is set near the onset of the Class 0 protostellar stage and remains roughly constant throughout the Class I protostellar stage.

Accepted to ApJ

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Cited by in corpus (19)

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• The VLA/ALMA Nascent Disk and Multiplicity (VANDAM) Survey of Orion Protostars. III. Substructures in Protostellar Disks
• Formation and Evolution of Disks around Young Stellar Objects
• Zooming in on Individual Star Formation: Low- and High-mass Stars
• KMOS study of the mass accretion rate from Class I to Class II in NGC 1333
• Formation and evolution of protostellar accretion discs. II. From 3D simulation to a simple semi-analytic model of Class 0/I discs
• Formation and evolution of protostellar accretion discs. I. Angular-momentum budget, gravitational self-regulation, and numerical convergence
• The impact of non-ideal magnetohydrodynamic processes on discs, outflows, counter-rotation and magnetic walls during the early stages of star formation
• Ionization: a possible explanation for the difference of mean disk sizes in star-forming regions
• The VLA/ALMA Nascent Disk and Multiplicity (VANDAM) Survey of Orion Protostars I. Identifying and Characterizing the Protostellar Content of the OMC2-FIR4 and OMC2-FIR3 Regions
• Flow of gas detected from beyond the filaments to protostellar scales in Barnard 5
• Mass Assembly of Stellar Systems and their Evolution with the SMA (MASSES) -- Full Data Release
• Do we need non-ideal magnetohydrodynamics to model protostellar discs?
• An observational correlation between magnetic field, angular momentum and fragmentation in the envelopes of Class 0 protostars?
• Lithium in coalesced non-compact stars
• Tracking the evolutionary stage of protostars by the abundances of astrophysical ices
• The VLA/ALMA Nascent Disk and Multiplicity (VANDAM) Survey of Orion Protostars VI. Insights from Radiative Transfer Modeling