Speaker
Description
The accretion processes in forming massive stars -more specifically those with M > 8 solar masses- are thought to be governed by the presence of a boundary layer close to the stellar surface and fed by the protoplanetary disk. This contrasts with the magnetospheric accretion mechanism that operates in T Tauri stars (see the contribution by Lucía Fullana in this symposium). Modelling such a boundary layer still presents many unresolved problems. One of them concerns the presence of emission lines superimposed on the continuum responsible for the excess flux at wavelengths blueward of the Balmer limit, as well as the mechanisms involved—e.g. the roles of viscosity and the velocity gradient within the boundary layer when gas in Keplerian rotation in the disk encounters the rapid stellar rotation. In this contribution, we present the first attempts to use the well-known code CLOUDY to model the structure and emission of a boundary layer surrounding the equatorial region of forming massive young stellar objects.
