Alfvenic Heating of Protostellar Accretion Disks

Abstract

We investigate the effects of heating generated by damping of Alfven waves on protostellar accretion disks. Two mechanisms of damping are investigated, nonlinear and turbulent, which were previously studied in stellar winds (Jatenco-Pereira & Opher 1989a, b). For the nominal values studied, f=delta v/v_{A}=0.002 and F=varpi/Omega_{i}=0.1, where delta v, v_{A} and varpi are the amplitude, velocity and average frequency of the Alfven wave, respectively, and Omega_{i} is the ion cyclotron frequency, we find that viscous heating is more important than Alfven heating for small radii. When the radius is greater than 0.5 AU, Alfvenic heating is more important than viscous heating. Thus, even for the relatively small value of f=0.002, Alfvenic heating can be an important source of energy for ionizing protostellar disks, enabling angular momentum transport to occur by the Balbus-Hawley instability.

21 pages, 9 figures. Accepted for publication in ApJ

References in corpus (1)

• Accretion Disks Around Young Objects. II. Tests of Well-Mixed Models with Ism Dust

Cited by in corpus (5)

• The Effects of Alfven Waves and Radiation Pressure in Dust Winds of Late-type Stars
• The role of damped Alfven waves on magnetospheric accretion models of young stars
• Evolution of active galactic nuclei broad-line region clouds: low- and high-ionization lines
• Global Alfven Wave Heating of the Magnetosphere of Young Stars
• Alfven Waves in Disks, Outflows and Jets