Accretion-driven winds of T Tauri stars: A new generation of models with self-consistent coronal heating and MHD turbulence

Abstract

Classical T Tauri stars are observed to be surrounded by both accretion flows and some kind of wind or jet‐like outflow. There are several possible explanations of how and where the outflows arise, including disk winds, X‐winds, impulsive (CME‐like) ejections, and stellar winds. Recent work by Matt and Pudritz has suggested that if there is a stellar wind with a mass loss rate about 0.1 times the accretion rate, the wind may be able to carry away enough angular momentum to keep the stars from being spun up unrealistically by accretion. In this presentation, I show a preliminary set of theoretical models of accretion‐driven winds from the polar regions of T Tauri stars. These models are based on recently published self‐consistent simulations of the Sun’s coronal heating and wind acceleration. In addition to the convection‐driven MHD turbulence (which dominates in the solar case), I add a source of wave energy at the photosphere that is driven by the impact of plasma in neighboring flux tubes undergoing magnetospheric accretion. This added energy, which is determined quantitatively from the far‐field theory of MHD wave generation, seems to be enough to produce T Tauri‐like mass loss rates. It is still uncertain, though, whether it is enough to solve the T Tauri angular momentum problem.