Does size matter? The case of the HH80-81 disk

It is well known that low-mass stars are formed through an accretion disk which transports gas and dust from the envelope of the system to the protostar. HH80-81 seems to be very similar to the disk-jet systems found in low- and intermediate-mass protostars presenting a highly collimated and well-defined jet, a compact dust disk clearly perpendicular to the jet and possible rotating motions of the molecular gas around the massive protostar.

The linear polarization of the dust emission is detected almost all along the disk, and its properties suggest that dust polarization is produced mainly by self-scattering. The polarization characteristic suggests that dust settling has not occurred yet, with a maximum dust grain size between 50 and 500 microns. We applied disk models that have successfully explained disks around low-mass protostars as those developed by D'Alessio et al. (2001, 2006).

These models satisfactorily explain the ALMA image at 1.14 mm with a massive central object (~20 Msun) and a massive disk (~7 Msun). The models show that on a first approximation the high-mass star formation process seems to be a scaled-up version of the low-mass star-formation scenario.