Trapped Protostellar Winds and the Breakout Time

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I examine the question of purely accreting protostars, and set limits to the breakout time of a protostellar wind within the accretion flow forming the new star. Hypothesizing a wind launched from the protostellar surface, three temporal phases are derived: a crushed wind, a trapped wind, and an escaping wind. In the current model, evolution from one phase to the next is a consequence of the growing anisotropy of the Mailing flow, a natural outcome of the collapse of a rotating cloud core. During the crushed wind phase, infall overcomes the wind at all solid angles, and the accretion directly strikes the protostellar surface. The trapped phase consists of a wind sufficiently strong to push material back from the stellar surface, but too weak to carry the heavy, shocked and sweptup infall out of the star’s gravitational potential. Unless the wind turns on impulsively, a significant fraction of the pre-breakout life of the protostar may be spent in this trapped wind phase in which gas is launched from the protostar but is pulled back, crashing onto the protostellar and disk surfaces. It may be that some ‘starless cores’ contain as-yet undetected, very young accreting protostars, and that episodic luminosity fluctuations associated with this trapped wind could be observed.