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A Keplerian disk with a four-arm spiral birthing an episodically accreting high-mass protostar

Nature Astronomy volume 7, pages 557–568 (2023)Cite this article

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 16 March 2023

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Abstract

High-mass protostars (M⋆ > 8M⊙) are thought to gain the majority of their mass via short, intense bursts of growth. This episodic accretion is thought to be facilitated by gravitationally unstable and subsequently inhomogeneous accretion disks. Limitations of observational capabilities, paired with a lack of observed accretion burst events, have withheld affirmative confirmation of the association between disk accretion, instability and the accretion burst phenomenon in high-mass protostars. Following its 2019 accretion burst, a heatwave driven by a burst of radiation propagated outward from the high-mass protostar G358.93-0.03-MM1. Six very long baseline interferometry observations of the radiatively pumped 6.7 GHz methanol maser were conducted during this period, tracing ever increasing disk radii as the heatwave propagated outward. Concatenating the very long baseline interferometry maps provided a sparsely sampled, milliarcsecond view of the spatio-kinematics of the accretion disk covering a physical range of ~50–900 AU. We term this observational approach ‘heatwave mapping’. We report the discovery of a Keplerian accretion disk with a spatially resolved four-arm spiral pattern around G358.93-0.03-MM1. This result positively implicates disk accretion and spiral arm instabilities into the episodic accretion high-mass star formation paradigm.

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Fig. 1: Moment maps of the 6.7 GHz methanol masers in G358-MM1.
Fig. 2: Methanol maser spatio-kinematics in G358-MM1.
Fig. 3: Analyses of maser data.
Fig. 4: Identification of spiral arms A and B.
Fig. 5: Four-arm spiral identification.
Fig. 6: Velocity residuals upon subtracting the Keplerian disk model.

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Data availability

Data used in this work can be accessed by searching experiment codes (Table 1) in the following data archives: LBA data (https://atoa.atnf.csiro.au), EVN data (http://archive.jive.nl/scripts/portal.php) and VLBA data (https://data.nrao.edu/portal/#/). The maser spotmaps used in this work, in addition to calibrated data from the six epochs in FITS format, are available at the following link: https://www.masermonitoring.com/g358-mm1-data-availability.

Code availability

The correlate2d algorithm is available from Python’s SciPy package (version 1.10.0). The MCMC algorithm is available from Python’s emcee package (version 3.1.3). The RANSAC algorithm is available from the Python’s scikit-learn package (version 0.19.2).

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Acknowledgements

R.A.B. acknowledges support through the EACOA Fellowship from the East Asian Core Observatories Association. R.A.B., J.O.C. and G.C.M. acknowledge the Global Emerging Radio Astronomy Foundation for contributions to radio astronomy. T.H. is financially supported by the MEXT/JSPS KAKENHI Grant nos. 17K05398, 18H05222 and 20H05845. Y.Y. is financially supported by the MEXT/JSPS KAKANHI Grant nos. 21H01120 and 21H00032. L.U. acknowledges support from the University of Guanajuato (Mexico) Grant ID CIIC 164/2022. A.C.o.G. acknowledges support by PRIN-INAF-MAIN-STREAM 2017. M.O. thanks the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Poland for support and granting funds for the Polish contribution to the International LOFAR Telescope (arrangement no. 2021/WK/02) and for maintenance of the LOFAR PL-612 Baldy (MSHE decision no. 28/530020/SPUB/SP/2022). A.B. and M.D. acknowledge support from the National Science Centre, Poland through Grant 2021/43/B/ST9/02008. O.B. acknowledges financial support from the Italian Ministry of University and Research – Project Proposal CIR01_00010. A.M.S. and D.A.L. were supported by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation (state contract FEUZ-2023-0019). D.J. is supported by NRC Canada and by an NSERC Discovery Grant.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Mizusawa VLBI Observatory, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Mitaka, Japan

    R. A. Burns & T. Hirota

  2. Department of Science, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Mitaka, Japan

    R. A. Burns

  3. Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, Daejeon, Republic of Korea

    R. A. Burns, N. Sakai & Kee-Tae Kim

  4. Department of Physics, National Chung Hsing University, Taichung, Taiwan

    Y. Uno

  5. National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand (Public Organization), Chiangmai, Thailand

    N. Sakai & K. Sugiyama

  6. NRAO, Socorro, NM, USA

    J. Blanchard

  7. Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

    Z. Rosli

  8. Joint Institute for VLBI ERIC, Dwingeloo, the Netherlands

    G. Orosz

  9. Center for Astronomy, Ibaraki University, Mito, Japan

    Y. Yonekura & Y. Tanabe

  10. Department of Astronomical Sciences, SOKENDAI (The Graduate University for Advanced Studies), Mitaka, Japan

    T. Hirota

  11. University of Science and Technology, Daejeon, Republic of Korea

    Kee-Tae Kim

  12. Ventspils International Radio Astronomy Center, Ventspils University of Applied Sciences, Ventspils, Latvia

    A. Aberfelds

  13. Radio Astronomy and Geodynamics Department of Crimean Astrophysical Observatory, Katsiveli, Ukraine

    A. E. Volvach

  14. Institute of Astronomy, Faculty of Physics, Astronomy and Informatics, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Torun, Poland

    A. Bartkiewicz & M. Durjasz

  15. INAF Osservatorio Astronomico di Capodimonte Napoli, Naples, Italy

    A. Caratti o Garatti

  16. Astronomical Observatory, Ural Federal University, Ekaterinburg, Russia

    A. M. Sobolev & D. A. Ladeyschikov

  17. Thüringer Landessternwarte, Tautenburg, Germany

    B. Stecklum & J. Eislöffel

  18. NRAO, Charlottesville, VA, USA

    C. Brogan & T. R. Hunter

  19. Australia Telescope National Facility, CSIRO, Epping, New South Wales, Australia

    C. Phillips

  20. NRC Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

    D. Johnstone

  21. INAF Osservatorio Astronomico di Cagliari, Selargius, Italy

    G. Surcis

  22. Department of Physical Sciences, The Open University of Tanzania, Dar-Es-Salaam, Tanzania

    G. C. MacLeod

  23. Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory, Krugersdorp, South Africa

    G. C. MacLeod & S. P. van den Heever

  24. Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, Germany

    H. Linz

  25. Space Research Unit, Physics Department, North West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa

    J. O. Chibueze

  26. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Faculty of Physical Sciences, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria

    J. O. Chibueze

  27. INAF - Istituto di Radioastronomia and Italian ALMA Regional Centre, Bologna, Italy

    J. Brand

  28. School of Natural Sciences, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

    L. Hyland & S. P. Ellingsen

  29. Departamento de Astronomía, Universidad de Guanajuato, Guanajuato, Mexico

    L. Uscanga

  30. Space Radio-Diagnostic Research Center, Faculty of Geoengineering, University of Warmia and Mazury Oczapowskiego 2, Olsztyn, Poland

    M. Olech

  31. INAF - Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri, Florence, Italy

    O. Bayandina

  32. SKA Observatory, Jodrell Bank, Macclesfield, UK

    S. Breen

  33. Center for Astrophysics, Guangzhou University, Guangzhou, China

    X. Chen

  34. Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China

    X. Chen

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  1. R. A. Burns
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  15. A. Caratti o Garatti
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Contributions

R.A.B. led the project as principal investigator for the observations, processed the VLBI data and authored the paper. Y.U. performed the Keplerian modelling of the maser data. N.S. performed the spiral arm identification procedures using RANSAC and MCMC. J. Blanchard conducted the two-dimensional cross-correlation for identification of additional spiral arms. Z.R. conducted the disk inclination measurement. K.S. and Y.Y. selected the target maser source. A.E.V., J. Brand, S.P.v.d.H., Y.Y., Y.T., A.A., G.C.M., M.O. and M.D. conducted single-dish monitoring of masers towards G358.93-0.03. G.O., S.P.E., L.H. and C.P. conducted the LBA observations. All authors contributed to the scientific discussion and helped with the authorship and reviewing process of the paper.

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Correspondence to R. A. Burns.

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Burns, R.A., Uno, Y., Sakai, N. et al. A Keplerian disk with a four-arm spiral birthing an episodically accreting high-mass protostar. Nat Astron 7, 557–568 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-023-01899-w

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