Observational signatures of outbursting protostars -- II: Exploring a wide range of eruptive protostars

Abstract

Young stars exhibit variability due to changes in the gas accretion rate onto them, an effect that should be quite significant in the early stages of their formation. As protostars are embedded within their natal cloud, this variability may only be inferred through long wavelength observations. We perform radiative transfer simulations of young stellar objects (YSOs) formed in hydrodynamical simulations, varying the structure and luminosity properties in order to estimate the long-wavelength, sub-mm and mm, variations of their flux. We find that the flux increase due to an outburst event depends on the protostellar structure and is more prominent at sub-mm wavelengths than at mm wavelengths; e.g. a factor of 40 increase in the luminosity of the young protostar leads to a flux increase of a factor of 10 at 250 micron but only a factor of 2.5 at 1.3 mm. We find that the interstellar radiation field dilutes the flux increase but that this effect may be avoided if resolution permits the monitoring of the inner regions of a YSO, where the heating is primarily due to protostellar radiation. We also confirm that the bolometric temperature and luminosity of outbursting protostars may result in an incorrect classification of their evolutionary stage.

MNRAS accepted, 8 pages, 9 figures

References in corpus (11)

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Cited by in corpus (14)

• CCAT-prime Collaboration: Science Goals and Forecasts with Prime-Cam on the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope
• The Relationship between Mid-Infrared and Sub-Millimetre Variability of Deeply Embedded Protostars
• Radiative Transfer modeling of EC 53: An Episodically Accreting Class I Young Stellar Object
• Analysis of physical processes in eruptive YSOs with near infrared spectra and multi-wavelength light curves
• Discovery of a mid-infrared protostellar outburst of exceptional amplitude
• Dissecting the different components of the modest accretion bursts of the very young protostar HOPS 373
• Accretion Burst Echoes as Probes of Protostellar Environments and Episodic Mass Assembly
• EXORCISM: a spectroscopic survey of young eruptive variables (EXor and candidates)
• The most variable VVV sources: eruptive protostars, dipping giants in the Nuclear Disc and others
• The JCMT Transient Survey: Single Epoch Transients and Variability of Faint Sources
• The burst mode of accretion in massive star formation with stellar inertia
• The JCMT Transient Survey: Four Year Summary of Monitoring the Submillimeter Variability of Protostars
• Submillimetre Transient Science in the Next Decade: EAO Submillimetre Futures White Paper Series, 2019
• Infrared observations of the flaring maser source G358.93-0.03 -- SOFIA confirms an accretion burst from a massive young stellar object