Wind-driven Accretion in Transitional Protostellar Disks

Understand

Transitional protostellar disks have inner cavities heavily depleted in dust and gas, yet most show signs of ongoing accretion, often at rates comparable to full disks.

• We show that recent constraints on the gas surface density in a few well-studied disk cavities imply that the accretion speed is at least transsonic.
• We propose that this is the natural result of accretion driven by magnetized winds.
• Typical physical conditions of the gas inside such cavities are estimated for plausible X-ray and FUV radiation fields.