Friday, December 30, 2011

1112.6226 (Miljenko Čemeljić et al.)

Magnetospheric Accretion and Ejection of Matter in Resistive Magnetohydrodynamic Simulations    [PDF]

Miljenko Čemeljić, Hsien Shang, Tzu-Yang Chiang
We investigate the launching of outflows in the close vicinity of a young stellar object, treating the innermost portion of an accretion disk as a gravitationally bound reservoir of matter. By solving the resistive MHD equations with our version of the Zeus-3D code with implemented resistivity, we study the effect of magnetic diffusivity in the magnetospheric accretion-ejection mechanism. Physical resistivity has been included in the whole computational region. We show, for the first time, that quasi-stationary outflows consisting of axial and conical components can be launched from a purely resistive magnetosphere. We identify four stages of magnetospheric interaction with distinctly different geometries of the magnetic field, and describe the effect of magnetic reconnection in re-shaping the magnetic field. The stages are the relaxation, reconnection and infall, after which two outflow components can be seen in a final flow: a fast axial component launched from above the star, dominated by magnetic pressure, and a slow conical component, launched from the opened resistive magnetosphere of a disk gap, between the star and the disk inner radius. We show how outflows depend on the disk to corona density ratio and on strength of the magnetic field, and compare the position of the disk truncation radius with theoretical predictions. Results from previous investigations with resistive MHD in the literature, which have been obtained with various setups, are recovered in our simulations. Comparisons are thus made easier for more general purposes, by identifying previous features in the simulations within the different stages of our simulation.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.6226

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