Laboratory unraveling of matter accretion in young stars

Guilhem Revet (1, 2) , Sophia Chen (1, 2) , Rosaria Bonito (3, 4) , Benjamin Khiar (5) , Evgeny Filippov (6, 7) , Costanza Argiroffi (4) , Drew Higginson (1, 8) , Salvatore Orlando (3) , Jérome Béard (9) , Marius Blecher (10) , Marco Borghesi (11) , Konstantin Burdonov (2) , Dimitri Khaghani (12) , Kealan Naughton (11) , Henri Pépin (13) , Oliver Portugall (9) , Raphaël Riquier (14, 1) , Rafael Rodriguez (15) , Sergei Ryazantsev (7) , Igor Yu. Skobelev (6) , Alexander Soloviev (2) , Oswald Willi (10) , Sergey Pikuz (6, 7) , Andrea Ciardi (5) , Julien Fuchs (1, 2)

1 LULI - Laboratoire pour l'utilisation des lasers intenses
2 IAP, Nizhny Novgorod - Institute of Applied Physics
3 INAF - Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica
4 DiFC - Dipartimento di Fisica e Chimica [Palermo]
5 LERMA (UMR_8112) - Laboratoire d'Etude du Rayonnement et de la Matière en Astrophysique
6 The National Research Nuclear University MEPhI (Moscow Engineering Physics Institute) [Moscow, Russia]
7 JIHT - Joint Institute for High Temperatures of the RAS
8 LLNL - Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
9 LNCMI-T - Laboratoire national des champs magnétiques intenses - Toulouse
10 Institut für Laser und Plasmaphysik
11 QUB - Queen's University [Belfast]
12 Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung
13 EMT-INRS - Énergie Matériaux Télécommunications - INRS
14 DAM - Direction des Applications Militaires
15 ULPGC - University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

Accretion dynamics in the formation of young stars is still a matter of debate because of limitations in observations and modeling. Through scaled laboratory experiments of collimated plasma accretion onto a solid in the presence of a magnetic field, we open a first window on this phenomenon by tracking, with spatial and temporal resolution, the dynamics of the system and simultaneously measuring multiband emissions. We observe in these experiments that matter, upon impact, is ejected laterally from the solid surface and then refocused by the magnetic field toward the incoming stream. This ejected matter forms a plasma shell that envelops the shocked core, reducing escaped x-ray emission. This finding demonstrates one possible structure reconciling current discrepancies between mass accretion rates derived from x-ray and optical observations, respectively.

Domains: Physics [physics]; Astrophysics [astro-ph]

Guilhem Revet, Sophia Chen, Rosaria Bonito, Benjamin Khiar, Evgeny Filippov, et al.. Laboratory unraveling of matter accretion in young stars. Science Advances , 2017, 3 (11), pp.e1700982. ⟨10.1126/sciadv.1700982⟩. ⟨cea-01887635⟩