The High Mass Accretion in the Innermost Regions of a Viscously Evolved Protoplanetary Disk

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the mass accretion properties in the innermost regions of a viscously evolved protoplanetary disk and try to find some clues to the outburst events. In our newly developed one-dimensional time-dependent disk model based on the diffusion equation for surface density, we take into account the following physical effects: the gravitational collapse of the parent molecular cloud core, the irradiation from the central star to the disk, the effect of the photoevaporation mechanism, the viscosity due to the magnetorotational instability (MRI) and the gravitational instability (GI), and the thermal ionization mechanism in the inner regions. We find that the mass accretion rate M·disk in the innermost regions is statistically high enough to generate outbursts, although there are regions where the accretion rate is low. Additionally, we find that there is a weak correlation between the high mass accretion rate M·disk and the molecular cloud core’s properties (angular velocity ω and mass Mcd), as well as a strong correlation with the minimum viscosity parameter αmin. In general, there are two regions of outburst, the inner Region I and outer Region II. The outburst of Region I is caused by the MRI mechanism and thermal instability, while neither the MRI, the GI, nor the thermal instability causes the outburst of Region II. Our analysis suggests that the outer Region II is dominated by, or largely related to, the Rosseland mean opacity κR and the αmin parameter.