English

Resolving the Binary Components of the Outbursting Protostar HBC 494 with ALMA

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2023-06-28 v2 Earth and Planetary Astrophysics Astrophysics of Galaxies

Abstract

Episodic accretion is a low-mass pre-main sequence phenomenon characterized by sudden outbursts of enhanced accretion. These objects are classified into two: protostars with elevated levels of accretion that lasts for decades or more, called FUors, and protostars with shorter and repetitive bursts, called EXors. HBC 494 is a FUor object embedded in the Orion Molecular Cloud. Earlier Atacama Large (sub-)Millimeter Array (ALMA) continuum observations showed an asymmetry in the disk at 0.''2 resolution. Here, we present follow-up observations at ~0.''03, resolving the system into two components: HBC 494 N (primary) and HBC 494 S (secondary). No circumbinary disk was detected. Both disks are resolved with a projected separation of ~0.''18 (75 au). Their projected dimensions are 84+/-1.8 x 66.9+/-1.5 mas for HBC 494 N and 64.6+/-2.5 x 46.0+/-1.9 mas for HBC 494 S. The disks are almost aligned and with similar inclinations. The observations show that the primary is ~5 times brighter/more massive and ~2 times bigger than the secondary. We notice that the northern component has a similar mass to the FUors, while the southern has to EXors. The HBC 494 disks show individual sizes that are smaller than single eruptive YSOs. In this work, we also report 12CO, 13CO, and C18O molecular line observations. At large scale, the 12CO emission shows bipolar outflows, while the 13CO and C18O maps show a rotating and infalling envelope around the system. At a smaller scale, the 12CO and 13CO moment zero maps show cavities within the continuum disks' area, which may indicate continuum over-subtraction or slow-moving jets and chemical destruction along the line-of-sight.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2305.15647,
  title  = {Resolving the Binary Components of the Outbursting Protostar HBC 494 with ALMA},
  author = {Pedro Henrique Nogueira and Alice Zurlo and Sebastián Pérez and Camilo González-Ruilova and Lucas A. Cieza and Antonio Hales and Trisha Bhowmik and Dary A. Ruíz-Rodríguez and David A. Principe and Gregory J. Herczeg and Jonathan P. Williams and Jorge Cuadra and Matías Montesinos and Nicolás Cuello and Prachi Chavan and Simon Casassus and Zhaohuan Zhu and Felipe G. Goicovic},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.15647},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Published in MNRAS. Main text (11 pages, 8 figures). Appendix (11 pages, 9 figures). Total (22 pages, 17 figures)