Pre-main sequence stars are observed to have powerful winds over
much of their lifetimes, with the winds from young, embedded protostars
sweeping up their surrounding cores to produce massive molecular outflows, and
the winds from older, optically-visible T Tauri stars seen directly as
Herbig-Haro jets.
These winds are believed to be driven
by a combination of magnetic and centrifugal forces,
and may originate either in the body of the protoplanetary disk surrounding
the forming star, or at the interface of the disk and the stellar
magnetosphere.
Our group at Maryland is involved in theoretical modeling and analysis of the structure and kinematics of swept-up wind shells and bow shock shells, and their comparison to observational data (see Figures below). With collaborators at Maryland and other institutions, I have also studied the processes of MHD wind acceleration and collimation, and analyzed the susceptibility of MHD winds to a local and global instabilities. These studies involve a combination of analytic and semi-analytic calculations, steady-state numerical solutions, time-dependent numerical simulations, and radio observations.
Comparison of shell shape from simulation and ballistic bow shock model
Comparison of position-velocity structure in bow shock shell from simulation
and ballistic bow shock model
For more information, see publications page.
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