English

Digging into the chemical complexity in the outer Galaxy: A hot molecular core in Sharpless 2-283

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2026-02-04 v1

Abstract

The outer Galaxy (galactocentric distance \gtrsim13.5 kpc) serves as an excellent laboratory for investigating the chemical complexity in low-metallicity environments. Here, we present the chemical analyses for the outer Galactic hot core Sh 2-283-1a SMM1 (DGCD_\mathrm{GC} = 15.7 kpc and ZZ \sim0.3 ZZ_\odot), recently detected by Ikeda et al. (2025) using ALMA. Toward this source, a variety of molecular species, including complex organic molecules (COMs: CH3_3OH, 13^{13}CH3_3OH, CH2_2DOH, and CH3_3OCH3_3) are detected. The molecular abundances relative to CH3_3OH are similar to those of another outer Galactic hot core, demonstrating that chemically rich hot cores exist in different regions of the outer Galaxy. We also compared molecular abundances among hot cores in the inner Galaxy, outer Galaxy, and Magellanic Clouds. This comparison revealed that the metallicity-corrected NN(SO2_2)/NN(H2_2) ratios of outer Galactic hot cores are significantly lower than those of the inner Galactic ones, while their NN(CH3_3OH)/NN(H2_2) ratios are similar. The Magellanic hot cores show different trends despite having metallicities similar to those of the outer Galaxy, indicating that the chemical complexity of hot cores is governed by environmental conditions (e.g., cosmic ray intensity and dust temperature) rather than simple metallicity scaling. These environmental differences would also affect the production efficiency of COMs derived from CH3_3OH, as the NN(CH3_3OCH3_3)/NN(CH3_3OH) and NN(C2_2H5_5OH)/NN(CH3_3OH) ratios in the outer Galactic sources are moderately lower than those of inner Galactic sources. The NN(CH2_2DOH)/NN(CH3_3OH) ratio of Sh 2-283-1a SMM1 is 1.51.2+3.9^{+3.9}_{-1.2}%\%, comparable to that of inner Galactic high-mass sources.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.03122,
  title  = {Digging into the chemical complexity in the outer Galaxy: A hot molecular core in Sharpless 2-283},
  author = {Toki Ikeda and Takashi Shimonishi and Hiroyuki Kaneko and Kenji Furuya and Kei Tanaka and Natsuko Izumi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.03122},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

19 pages, 10 figures, and 2 tables, accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal