Speaker:  Mike J. Cai (ASIAA)

Time:  1:30pm, Friday (July 17, 2009)

Location:  middle conf. room, 3rd floor

Abstract：

We review some of the recent developments in the study of protostellar jets. It was postulated that in steady state, an MRI driven accretion disk would have a magnetic Prandtl’s number on the order of one over the aspect ratio. Consequently a large fraction of the magnetic flux would be advected toward the inner edge of the disk, and the majority of the disk would be rotating at a sub-Keplerian rate. Based on this field geometry, we have constructed models of jets driven by magnetocentrifugal acceleration, known as the X-wind. The semi-analytic solutions give good agreement with numerical simulations and observations.