Streamers: The Hidden Highways of Star Formation

Streamers: The Hidden Highways of Star Formation

Observations across various wavelengths and scales, and simulations of star formation under diverse physical conditions, reveal that protostellar systems are connected and interact with their local environment (>1000 au) across different evolutionary stages. In recent years, there has been a rise in the discovery of streamers, one of the most tangible proofs of this connection between the environment and protostars: these are long gas structures (~1000–10000 astronomical units) that feed protostellar and protoplanetary disks with material potentially coming from outside the natal birth core. Most streamer detections have been serendipitous discoveries with interferometers such as ALMA and NOEMA, but now dedicated programs are expanding our knowledge of their nature, how frequent they are, and what kind of material (and how much) they feed to disks. In this presentation, I will review our current knowledge of streamers, drawing from observations across diverse star-forming regions and stages of star formation. In the talk, I will highlight recent efforts to draw statistics from streamer observations, detect their landing sites into disks, and understand their physical nature through comparison with models and simulations. In a nutshell, recent work indicates that streamers tend to be more common in the earliest, embedded stages of star formation, but late infall of material, when present, can have a deep impact on the structure of protoplanetary disks. I will finally discuss future open questions related to the role of streamers in star and planet formation and how we could address them.

Sebastián López
Coordinador de Coloquios
DAS/UChile  – slopez@das.uchile.cl