Publication Details

AFRICAN RESEARCH NEXUS

SHINING A SPOTLIGHT ON AFRICAN RESEARCH

earth and planetary sciences

The chemical structure of young high-mass star-forming clumps. II. parsec-scale co depletion and deuterium fraction of HCO+

Astrophysical Journal, Volume 901, No. 2, Article A9, Year 2020

The physical and chemical properties of cold and dense molecular clouds are key to understanding how stars form. Using the IRAM 30 m and NRO 45 m telescopes, we carried out a Multiwavelength line-Imaging survey of the 70 μm-dArk and bright clOuds (MIAO). At a linear resolution of 0.1-0.5 pc, this work presents a detailed study of parsec-scale CO depletion and HCO+ deuterium (D-) fractionation toward four sources (G11.38+0.81, G15.22-0.43, G14.49-0.13, and G34.74-0.12) included in our full sample. In each source with T < 20 K and nH ∼ 104-105 cm-3, we compared pairs of neighboring 70 μm bright and dark clumps and found that (1) the H2 column density and dust temperature of each source show strong spatial anticorrelation; (2) the spatial distribution of CO isotopologue lines and dense gas tracers, such as 1-0 lines of H13CO+ and DCO+, are anticorrelated; (3) the abundance ratio between C18O and DCO+ shows a strong correlation with the source temperature; (4) both the C18O depletion factor and D-fraction of HCO+ show a robust decrease from younger clumps to more evolved clumps by a factor of more than 3; and (5) preliminary chemical modeling indicates that chemical ages of our sources are ∼8 × 104 yr, which is comparable to their free-fall timescales and smaller than their contraction timescales, indicating that our sources are likely dynamically and chemically young.

Statistics
Citations: 22
Authors: 22
Affiliations: 18
Identifiers
Study Design
Cross Sectional Study
Study Approach
Quantitative