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

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 surroun…