1998/10/30 by Philip J. Armitage, C. J. Clarke, Christopher A. Tout +1 · 4 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astro and Planetary Science #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1046/j.1365-8711.1999.02320.x
11 pages, MNRAS in press
arxiv created 1998/10/30 · openalex publication_date 1999/04/07 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We present theoretical models for the evolution of T Tauri stars surrounded by circumstellar discs. The models include the effects of pre-main-sequence stellar and time-dependent disc evolution, and incorporate the effects of stellar magnetic fields acting on the inner disc. For single stars, consistency with observations in Taurus–Auriga demands that disc dispersal occurs rapidly, on much less than the viscous time-scale of the disc, at roughly the epoch when heating by stellar radiation first dominates over internal viscous dissipation. Applying the models to close binaries, we find that because the initial conditions for discs in binaries are uncertain, studies of extreme mass ratio systems are required to provide a stringent test of theoretical disc evolution models. We also note that no correlation of the infrared colours of T Tauri stars with their rotation rate is observed, in apparent contradiction to the predictions of simple magnetospheric accretion models.