Braking down an accreting protostar: disc-locking, disc winds, stellar winds, X-winds and Magnetospheric Ejecta

UJF-Grenoble 1/CNRS-INSU, Institut de Planétologie et d'Astrophysique de Grenoble (IPAG) UMR 5274, 38041 Grenoble, France

Abstract

Classical T Tauri stars are low mass young forming stars that are surrounded by a circumstellar accretion disc from which they gain mass. Despite this accretion and their own contraction that should both lead to their spin up, these stars seem to conserve instead an almost constant rotational period as long as the disc is maintained. Several scenarios have been proposed in the literature in order to explain this puzzling “disc-locking” situation: either deposition in the disc of the stellar angular momentum by the stellar magnetosphere or its ejection through winds, providing thereby an explanation of jets from Young Stellar Objects.

In this lecture, these various mechanisms will be critically detailed, from the physics of the star-disc interaction to the launching of self-confined jets (disc winds, stellar winds, X-winds, conical winds). It will be shown that no simple model can account alone for the whole bulk of observational data and that “disc locking” requires a combination of some of them.