Abstract

Simulations of collapsing giant molecular clouds show protostars forming with discs that may be massive enough to become gravitationally unstable. This may play a key role both in the formation of the star itself, and in the formation of giant planets through disc fragmentation. We extract a set of young discs (less than 1e5 years) from a global cloud collapse simulation (Bate 2012). We upscale the resolution of these discs using a novel particle splitting method and employ an improved radiative cooling approximation in our runs – both as a requirement to accurately capture fragmenting planetary-mass clumps. This suite of physically-motivated simulations from non-idealised initial conditions should provide a valuable insight into the frequency of disc fragmentation and any resultant protoplanetary population. In this talk I will present the workflow and numerical methods involved in this population study, as well as some key insights from early results