Abstract

Contributed Talk - Splinter SOFIA

Thursday, 14 September 2023, 16:45   (H 3006)

A posteriori disclosure of the most powerful protostellar accretion burst with HAWC+

Verena Wolf (1), Bringfried Stecklum (1), Jochen Eislöffel (1), Thomas Sperling (1), Christian Fischer (2), Hendrik Linz (3), Tim Harries (4)
Thüringer Landessternwarte (1), Deutsches SOFIA Institut (2), Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie (3), University of Exeter (4)

Protostellar growth is not a steady process, instead it features short periods of enhanced mass accretion. This leads to powerful outbursts, which heat the dense natal environment of the young stellar object (YSO). Sometimes, a thermal afterglow is detectable even several years after the event. For G323.46-0.08 (a YSO with approx. 20 solar masses), we found a flux excess of about 10% two years after the end of its outburst with HAWC+ aboard SOFIA. We use TORUS (a time-dependent radiative transfer code) to obtain major burst parameters. Our analysis shows, that G323’s burst probably is the most energetic one observed for a massive YSO. This is the first time, that time-dependent radiative transfer is applied to a real astrophysical object.