The Protostellar Luminosity Problem Repriced: Episodic Accretion Fractions from the Accretion Luminosity Budget

This paper addresses a single question: How bright should a steadily accreting protostar be, given the accretion rate implied by core temperatures, and by what factor do observed protostellar luminosities fall short? Using published molecular-cloud and young-stellar-object measurements as inputs, and carrying the spin-torsion density bound of 9.72 x 10^57 kilograms per cubic metre and its critical shear of 8.56 x 10^32 per second as fixed comparison scales, the calculation finds that steady accretion at the isothermal rate onto a half-solar-mass protostar predicts an accretion luminosity near ten solar luminosities, while the median observed protostellar luminosity is near one solar luminosity; the shortfall is about an order of magnitude, and it is removed if protostars spend roughly ninety percent of their assembly time accreting at about a tenth of the mean rate, with the remainder delivered in bursts - the standard episodic-accretion resolution, here quantified from the same rate used in the growth-time calculation. The headline values are: L steady Lsun = 8.4; L low state Lsun = 0.52; duty factor needed = 0.12. All values are computed from the stated formulae and inputs; this is a simulated and computed study, not a measurement. Where the comparison scales supplied by the torsion framework turn out to be too remote to influence the process, that outcome is reported as a negative result rather than passed over.