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Session 64 - Disks and Bipolar Outflows from Hot Stars - II.
Oral session, Wednesday, June 12
Union Theater,
There is a well-developed, observationally-tested paradigm for accretion flows around young stars, consisting of infall to a rotating circumstellar disk, followed by accretion through the disk onto the central star. Does this paradigm also apply to high-mass stars? Factors such as strong isotropic winds and radiation pressure could produce significant differences in the accretion physics of high- and low-mass stars. I shall outline the accretion paradigm for low mass stars, suggest how this might scale to the case of high mass star formation, and discuss some observational consequences of this scaling. I suggest that special environmental conditions are needed to form high-mass stars, and that these conditions may only be realized in regions where dense star clusters are formed.
