Princeton University Star Formation/ISM Rendezvous (SFIR) - Speaker 1

We study formation and long-term evolution of a circumstellar disk using a resistive MHD simulation. While the circumstellar disk is initially small, it grows up to 200 AUs as accretion continues. A pair of grand-design spiral arms form recurrently due to gravitational instability throughout the Class-0/I phase, and they transfer angular momentum efficiently. We compare our model with Elias 2-27 using the synthetic observation technique and find good agreement between our model and the observation. If such spiral arms commonly exist in young circumstellar disks, it implies that young circumstellar disks are considerably massive and gravitational instability is the key process of angular momentum transport.