Anisotropic Infall and Substructure Formation in Embedded Disks

The filamentary nature of accretion streams found around embedded sources suggests that protostellar disks experience heterogenous infall from the star-forming environment, consistent with the accretion behavior onto star-forming cores in top-down star-cluster formation simulations. This may produce disk substructures in the form of rings, gaps, and spirals that continue to be identified by high-resolution imaging surveys in both embedded Class 0/I and later Class II sources. We present a parameter study of anisotropic infall, informed by the properties of accretion flows onto protostellar cores in numerical simulations, and varying the relative specific angular momentum of incoming flows as well as their flow geometry. Our results show that anisotropic infall perturbs the disk and readily launches the Rossby wave instability. It forms vortices at the inner and outer edges of the infall zone where material is deposited. These vortices drive spiral waves and angular momentum transport, with some models able to drive stresses corresponding to a viscosity parameter on the order of alpha similar to 10(-2). The resulting azimuthal shear forms robust pressure bumps that act as barriers to radial drift of dust grains, as demonstrated by postprocessing calculations of drift-dominated dust evolution. We discuss how a self-consistent model of anisotropic infall can account for the formation of millimeter rings in the outer disk as well as producing compact dust disks, consistent with observations of embedded sources.

Automated summary

This study explores the impact of anisotropic infall on protostellar disks, showing that it disrupts the disk and triggers the Rossby wave instability, resulting in vortices and spiral waves. These vortices create pressure bumps that impede radial drift of dust grains, leading to the formation of millimeter rings and compact dust disks in the disk.