SF-06-0023

Determining the Mass and Accretion Mechanism of L1527 IRS

Blake Drechsler, John Tobin, Patrick Sheehan, Will Fischer, Lee Hartmann, Leslie Looney, S. Tom Megeath

Most of a star’s mass is assembled during the protostellar phase, so understanding how the star is accreting at this time is vital in understanding the formation process. We present JWST NIRSPEC and MIRI MRS observations towards the Class 0 protostar L1527 IRS. With these spectra we are able to constrain the accretion rate of the source and determine the accretion mechanism. We also present mass estimates for L1527 IRS and other Class 0/1 sources from the eDisk survey. This survey contains 19 sources and is the largest, high resolution (0.1 arcsecond) survey of protostars. We use the pdspy code to generate synthetic channel maps that are then fit to ALMA C18O data with nested sampling. With these precise mass measurements, we are able to disentangle the accretion luminosity from the protostellar luminosity for these sources, giving us a better understanding of how the energy budget of the protostar is divided.