Magnetic braking of accreting T Tauri stars: Effects of mass accretion rate, rotation, and dipolar field strength

TL;DR

This study uses magnetohydrodynamic simulations to analyze how magnetic field strength, rotation, and accretion rate influence the angular momentum transfer and spin evolution of accreting T Tauri stars.

Contribution

It introduces semi-analytic functions for stellar torque contributions, enabling predictions of star spin evolution considering magnetic interactions and accretion processes.

Findings

Accretion disks enhance stellar torque efficiency compared to isolated stars.

A stellar wind with about 1% of the accretion rate can remove up to 50% of angular momentum.

Achieving spin equilibrium may require a wind mass loss rate of approximately 25% of the accretion rate.

Abstract

The rotational evolution of accreting pre-main-sequence stars is influenced by its magnetic interaction with its surrounding circumstellar disk. Using the PLUTO code, we perform 2.5D magnetohydrodynamic, axisymmetric, time-dependent simulations of star-disk interaction---with an initial dipolar magnetic field structure, and a viscous and resistive accretion disk---in order to model the three mechanisms that contribute to the net stellar torque: accretion flow, stellar wind, and magnetospheric ejections (periodic inflation and reconnection events). We investigate how changes in the stellar magnetic field strength, rotation rate, and mass accretion rate (changing the initial disk density) affect the net stellar torque. All simulations are in a net spin-up regime. We fit semi-analytic functions for the three stellar torque contributions, allowing for the prediction of the net stellar torque for our parameter regime, and the possibility of investigating spin-evolution using 1D stellar evolution codes. The presence of an accretion disk appears to increase the efficiency of stellar torques compared to isolated stars, for cases with outflow rates much smaller than accretion rates, because the star-disk interaction opens more of the stellar magnetic flux compared to that from isolated stars. In our parameter regime, a stellar wind with a mass loss rate of $\approx 1 \%$ of the mass accretion rate is capable of extracting $\lesssim 50 \%$ of the accreting angular momentum. These simulations suggest that achieving spin-equilibrium in a representative T Tauri case within our parameter regime, e.g., BP Tau, would require a wind mass loss rate of $\approx 25\%$ of the mass accretion rate.