Accretion Shocks in Young Stars: the Role of Local Absorption on the X-ray Emission

Abstract

We investigate the X-ray emission from accretion shocks in classical T Tauri stars, due to the infalling material impacting the stellar surface. Several aspects in both observations and models of the accretion process are still unclear: the observed X-ray luminosity of the post-shock plasma is below the predicted value, the density vs temperature structure of the shocked plasma, with increasing densities at higher temperature, is opposite of what expected from simple accretion shock models. To address these issues we performed numerical magnetohydrodynamic simulations describing the impact of an accretion stream onto the stellar surface and considered the local absorption due to the surrounding medium. We explored the effects of absorption for different viewing angles and for the He-like line triplets commonly used for density diagnostic. From the model results we synthesize the X-ray emission from the accretion shock, producing maps and spectra. We perform density and temperature diagnostics on the synthetic spectra, and we directly compare our results with the observations. Our model shows that the X-ray fluxes detected are lower than expected because of the local absorption. The emerging spectra suggest a complex density vs temperature distribution proving that a detailed model accounting for a realistic treatment of the local absorption is needed to interpret the observations of X-ray emitting accretion shocks.