Xing Pan

Xing Pan

PhD student, NJU

Research

Accretion disks around massive protostars

As dense cores continue to collapse, circumstellar disks naturally form from infalling material under the influence of gravity and the redistribution of angular momentum through torques (Turner et al., 2014). While disks around nearby solar-type stars have been extensively studied in their structures, evolutions, and roles in planet formation (e.g., Ansdell et al. 2016, 2018; Andrews et al. 2018), the formation, properties, and role of disks around more distant and massive stars remain far less understood mainly due to the limited detections of such disks.

The role of magnetic fields in the Galactic Center

Molecular clouds are the primary sites of star formation, with stars forming in their densest regions. A nearly universal relation has been established between the star formation rate (SFR) and the mass of dense gas, both in Galactic molecular clouds and in external galaxies (e.g., Gao & Solomon; Lada et al. 2010). However, in the innermost 150 pc of the Milky Way, the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ), the current SFR is about an order of magnitude lower than predicted by this dense gas–star formation relation (Longmore et al. 2013; Barnes et al. 2017). We found that magnetic field plays a key role in affecting star formation in the CMZ.