My PhD at the Università degli Studi di Milano (2024) focused on a specific and poorly understood corner of star formation: what happens to the gas disc around a young star when that star is not alone. Most stars form in multiple systems: binaries, triples, higher-order hierarchies. The discs around them behave very differently from the idealised single-star case. At the time, most research treated every system with more than two stars as an effective binary, both analytically and in simulations. My work showed that assumption to fail in systematic and predictable ways.
The central question across my three papers was: how do these discs align, precess, and distribute mass? And what can we infer from observing them about the initial conditions of these systems and their natal regions: the orbital eccentricities, the mutual inclinations, at the moment of birth?
Key results:
- Identified for the first time the accretion trends in hierarchical triple systems and showed how they deviate from the binary case in predictable ways (MNRAS 2022 )
- Derived an analytical criterion for when accretion discs can reach a polar (perpendicular) alignment in triple or multiple stellar systems, extending prior binary-only theory (MNRAS 2023 )
- Developed a statistical method to constrain the initial distributions of orbital eccentricity and disc misalignment across a stellar population by measuring the polar disc fraction (A&A 2024 )
Links: Thesis (UniMI) · ORCID · ADS