English

Grain growth and its chemical impact in the first hydrostatic core phase

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2024-03-05 v1

Abstract

The first hydrostatic core (FHSC) phase is a brief stage in the protostellar evolution that is difficult to detect. Our goal is to characterize the chemical evolution of gas and dust during the formation of the FHSC. Moreover, we are interested in analyzing, for the first time with 3D magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations, the role of grain growth in its chemistry. We postprocessed 2×1052\times10^{5} tracer particles from a RAMSES\texttt{RAMSES} non-ideal MHD simulation using the codes NAUTILUS\texttt{NAUTILUS} and SHARK\texttt{SHARK} to follow the chemistry and grain growth throughout the simulation. A great chemical inheritance is seen, as gas-phase abundances of most of the C, O, N, and S reservoirs in the hot corino at the end of the simulation match the ice-phase abundances from the prestellar phase. Additionally, interstellar complex organic molecules (iCOMs) such as methyl formate, acetaldehyde, and formamide are formed during the warm-up process. The typical grain size in the hot corino (nH>1011 cm3)(n_{\rm H}>10^{11}\ {\rm cm^{-3}}) increases forty-fold during the last 30 kyr, with negligible effects on its chemical composition. At moderate densities (1010<nH<1011 cm3)(10^{10}<n_{\rm H}<10^{11}\ {\rm cm^{-3}}) and cool temperatures 15<T<5015<T<50 K, increasing grain sizes delay molecular depletion. Finally, at low densities (nH107 cm3)(n_{\rm H}\sim10^{7}\ {\rm cm^{-3}}), grains do not grow significantly. We also compared our results with a two-step model that reproduces well the abundances of C and O reservoirs, but not the N and S reservoirs. We conclude that the chemical composition of the FHSC is heavily determined by that of the parent prestellar core, chemo-MHD computations are needed for an accurate prediction of the abundances of the main N and S elemental reservoirs, and that the impact of grain growth in moderately dense areas delaying depletion permits the use of abundance ratios as grain growth proxies.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2403.01905,
  title  = {Grain growth and its chemical impact in the first hydrostatic core phase},
  author = {D. Navarro-Almaida and U. Lebreuilly and P. Hennebelle and A. Fuente and B. Commerçon and R. Le Gal and V. Wakelam and M. Gerin and P. Riviére-Marichalar and L. Beitia-Antero and Y. Ascasibar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.01905},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

24 pages, 26 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics