SF-04-0021

Rivers in the sky: streamers toward two embedded protostars in Perseus

Maria Teresa Valdivia Mena, Paola Caselli, Jaime Pineda, Dominique Segura-Cox

In the last few years, there has been a rising number of streamers discovered. Streamers are long gas structures (~ 1000-10000 au) that feed material to protostellar disks from both within and outside their natal cores. This newly observed infall mechanism goes against the classical picture of star formation, where accretion onto the protostar and protoplanetary disk is azimuthally symmetric. I present streamers found two embedded protostars in Perseus; both are still surrounded by some material from their natal core but were previously thought to be beyond their accretion phase. Per-emb-50 is located in the middle of the active star forming region NGC 1333. We found that its streamer delivers mass with a rate 5 to 10 times larger than the accretion rate from disk to protostar, implying an accumulation of mass within the disk that may trigger gravitational instabilities or accretion outbursts. The second streamer was identified toward B5-IRS1, an isolated protostar in the Barnard 5 dense core. Using a clustering algorithm, we disentangled the streamer from the rest of the envelope emission and determined that it deposits material on disk scales (~250 au). Our results suggest that both streamers originate from close-by fibers, kinematic substructures of the extremely large-scale filaments that harbor protostellar cores. These two streamers show that the local environment around protostars influences disk evolution even after the traditional main accretion phase.