Abstract
FU Ori outbursts are the most energetic events that protoplanetary disks experience. An outburst occurs when a disk instability increases the disk to star accretion rate by a factor of 10,000 for as long as 100-200 years. The truncation radius of the disk moves rapidly inward, collapsing the magnetospheric accretion funnel flow and causing the star to accrete material directly from the disk at its equator. The disk midplane can have temperatures of 30,000+ K and the disk atmosphere we observe has an effective temperature of 6,000-8,000 K. I will discuss the work I have done during my PhD thesis to model these disks, how my detailed study of the time evolution of two recent outbursts constrains the physics of the events, and how my recent detection of FUV continuum emission from FU Ori challenges previous models of the system. I will then discuss how we can leverage ALMA and JWST as well as existing chemical network models to study the impact of the outbursts on the planet forming environment in protoplanetary disks.
