Accretion Flows or Outflow Cavities? Uncovering the Gas Dynamics around Lupus 3-MMS.

Understanding how material accretes onto the rotationally supported disk from the surrounding envelope of gas and dust in the youngest protostellar systems is important for describing how disks are formed. Magnetohydrodynamic simulations of magnetized, turbulent disk formation usually show spiral-like streams of material (accretion flows) connecting the envelope to the disk. However, accretion flows in these early stages of protostellar formation still remain poorly characterized, due to their low intensity, and possibly some extended structures are disregarded as being part of the outflow cavity. We use ALMA archival data of a young Class 0 protostar, Lupus 3-MMS, to uncover four extended accretion flowâ€"like structures in C¹⁸O that follow the edges of the outflows. We make various types of positionâ€"velocity cuts to compare with the outflows and find the extended structures are not consistent with the outflow emission, but rather more consistent with a simple infall model. We then use a dendrogram algorithm to isolate five substructures in positionâ€"positionâ€"velocity space. Four out of the five substructures fit well (>95%) with our simple infall model, with specific angular momenta between 2.7â€"6.9 Ă— 10^âˆ'4 km s^âˆ'1 pc and mass-infall rates of 0.5â€"1.1 Ă— 10^âˆ'6 M _⊙ yr^âˆ'1. Better characterization of the physical structure in the supposed “outflow cavities” is important to disentangle the true outflow cavities and accretion flows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]