Circumstellar disk

A circumstellar disc (or circumstellar disk) is a torus, pancake or ring-shaped accumulation of matter composed of gas, dust, planetesimals, asteroids or collision fragments in orbit around a star. Around the youngest stars, they are the reservoirs of material out of which planets may form. Around mature stars, they indicate that planetesimal formation has taken place and around white dwarfs, they indicate that planetary material survived the whole of stellar evolution. Such a disc can manifest itself in various ways. A circumstellar disc (or circumstellar disk) is a torus, pancake or ring-shaped accumulation of matter composed of gas, dust, planetesimals, asteroids or collision fragments in orbit around a star. Around the youngest stars, they are the reservoirs of material out of which planets may form. Around mature stars, they indicate that planetesimal formation has taken place and around white dwarfs, they indicate that planetary material survived the whole of stellar evolution. Such a disc can manifest itself in various ways. According to the widely accepted model of star formation, sometimes referred to as the nebular hypothesis, a young star (protostar) is formed by the gravitational collapse of a pocket of matter within a giant molecular cloud. The infalling material possesses some amount of angular momentum, which results in the formation of a gaseous protoplanetary disc around the young, rotating star. The former is a rotating circumstellar disc of dense gas and dust that continues to feed the central star. It may contain a few percent of the mass of the central star, mainly in the form of gas which is itself mainly hydrogen. The main accretion phase lasts a few million years, with accretion rates typically between 10−7 and 10−9 solar masses per year (rates for typical systems presented in Hartmann et al.). The disc gradually cools in what is known as the T Tauri star stage. Within this disc, the formation of small dust grains made of rocks and ices can occur, and these can coagulate into planetesimals. If the disc is sufficiently massive, the runaway accretions begin, resulting in the appearance of planetary embryos. The formation of planetary systems is thought to be a natural result of star formation. A sun-like star usually takes around 100 million years to form. The infall of gas onto a binary system allows the formation of circumstellar and circumbinary discs. The formation of such a disc will occur for any binary system in which infalling gas contains some degree of angular momentum. A general progression of disc formation is observed with increasing levels of angular momentum: Once a circumstellar disc has formed, spiral density waves are created within the circumstellar material via a differential torque due to the binary's gravity. The majority of these discs form axissymmetric to the binary plane, but it is possible for processes such as the Bardeen-Petterson effect, a misaligned dipole magnetic field and radiation pressure to produce a significant warp or tilt to an initially flat disc. Strong evidence of tilted discs is seen in the systems Her X-1, SMC X-1, and SS 433 (among others), where a periodic line-of-sight blockage of X-ray emissions is seen on the order of 50–200 days; much slower than the systems' binary orbit of ~1 day. The periodic blockage is believed to result from precession of a circumprimary or circumbinary disc, which normally occurs retrograde to the binary orbit as a result of the same differential torque which creates spiral density waves in an axissymmetric disc. Evidence of tilted circumbinary discs can be seen through warped geometry within circumstellar discs, precession of protostellar jets, and inclined orbits of circumplanetary objects (as seen in the eclipsing binary TY CrA). For discs orbiting a low secondary-to-primary mass ratio binary, a tilted circumbinary disc will undergo rigid precession with a period on the order of years. For discs around a binary with a mass ratio of one, differential torques will be strong enough to tear the interior of the disc apart into two or more separate, precessing discs. Stages in circumstellar discs refer to the structure and the main composition of the disc at different times during its evolution. Stages include the phases when the disc is composed mainly of submicron-sized particles, the evolution of these particles into grains and larger objects, the agglomeration of larger objects into planetesimals, and the growth and orbital evolution of planetesimals into the planetary systems, like our Solar System or many other stars. Major stages of evolution of circumstellar discs: