Dispersal of Gaseous Circumstellar Discs around High-Mass Stars

Abstract

We study the dispersal of a gaseous disc surrounding a central high-mass stellar core once this circumstellar disc becomes fully ionized. If the stellar and surrounding EUV and X-ray radiations are so strong as to rapidly heat up and ionize the entire circumstellar disc as further facilitated by disc magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence, a shock can be driven to travel outward in the fully ionized disc, behind which the disc expands and thins. For an extremely massive and powerful stellar core, the ionized gas pressure overwhelms the centrifugal and gravitational forces in the disc. In this limit, we construct self-similar shock solutions for such an expansion and depletion phase. As a significant amount of circumstellar gas being removed, the relic disc becomes vulnerable to strong stellar winds and fragments into clumps. We speculate that disc disappearance happens rapidly, perhaps on a timescale of $\sim 10^3-10^4\hbox{yr}$ once the disc becomes entirely ionized sometime after the onset of thermal nuclear burning in a high-mass stellar core.