Related papers: Electron Abundance in Protostellar Cores
Elements in the interstellar medium (ISM) exist in the form of gas or dust. The interstellar extinction and elemental abundances provide crucial constraints on the composition, size and quantity of interstellar dust. Most of the extinction…
We investigate the molecular evolution and D/H abundance ratios that develop as star formation proceeds from a dense-cloud core to a protostellar core, by solving a gas-grain reaction network applied to a 1-D radiative hydrodynamic model…
We present a catalogue of molecular cloud cores drawn from high latitude, medium opacity clouds, using the all-sky IRAS Sky Survey Atlas (ISSA) images at 60 and 100~$\mu$m. The typical column densities of the cores are $ N(H_2)\sim 3.8…
The physical conditions in a collapsing cloud can be traced by observations of molecular lines. To correctly interpret these observations the abundance distributions of the observed species need to be derived. The chemistry in a collapsing…
Chemical diversity of the gas in low-mass protostellar cores is widely recognized. In order to explore its origin, a survey of chemical composition toward 36 Class 0/I protostars in the Perseus molecular cloud complex, which are selected in…
We use sub-arcsecond resolution ($\sim$0.4$''$) observations with NOEMA at 1.37 mm to study the dust emission and molecular gas of 18 high-mass star-forming regions. We combine the derived physical and chemical properties of individual…
(Abridged) We present evidence that low-mass starless cores, the simplest units of star formation, are systematically differentiated in their chemical composition. Molecules including CO and CS almost vanish near the core centers, where the…
Observations of dark cloud cores have been carried out in the mid-infrared using ISOCAM and in the far-infrared using ISOPHOT, both aboard the Infrared Space Observatory. The cores are in most cases detected in emission at 200 and 170…
We analyze an ensemble of simulated prestellar cores to facilitate interpretation of structure, kinematics, and lifetime of observed cores. While our theory predicts a "characteristic" density for star formation, it also predicts that the…
Starless cores represent the initial stage of evolution toward (proto)star formation, and a subset of them, known as prestellar cores, with high density (~ 10^6 cm^-3 or higher) and being centrally concentrated are expected to be embryos of…
A solar-type system starts from an initial molecular core that acquires organic complexity as it evolves. The so-called prestellar cores that can be studied are rare, which has hampered our understanding of how organic chemistry sets in and…
The X-ray spectra of Anomalous X-ray Pulsars have long been fit by smooth, empirical models such as the sum of a black-body plus a power law. These reproduce the ~0.5 to 10 keV range well, but fail at lower and higher energies, grossly…
We have observed several cloud cores in the Orion B (L1630) molecular cloud in the 2-1 transitions of C18O, C17O and 13C18O. We use these data to show that a model where the cores consist of very optically thick C18O clumps cannot explain…
Estimating molecular abundances ratios from the direct measurement of the emission of the molecules towards a variety of interstellar environments is indeed very useful to advance in our understanding of the chemical evolution of the…
We develop analytic approximations to the density evolution of prestellar cores, based on the results of hydrodynamical simulations. We use these approximations as input for a time-dependent gas-grain chemical code to investigate the…
We have compared molecular line emission to dust continuum emission and modeled molecular lines using Monte Carlo simulations in order to study the depletion of molecules and the ionization fraction in three preprotostellar cores, L1512,…
The early stages of low-mass star formation are likely to be subject to intense ionization by protostellar energetic MeV particles. As a result, the surrounding gas is enriched in molecular ions, such as HCO$^{+}$ and N$_{2}$H$^{+}$.…
We have measured the deuterium fractionation (through the column density ratio N(N2D+)/N(N2H+)) and the CO depletion factor (ratio between expected and observed CO abundance) in a sample of 10 high-mass protostellar candidates, in order to…
First protostellar cores are young stellar objects in the earliest evolutionary stage. They are hydrostatic objects formed soon after the central portions of star-forming cores become optically thick to dust emission. We consider their…
We present a near-infrared extinction study of nine dense cores at evolutionary stages between starless to Class I. Our results show that the density structure of all but one observed cores can be modeled with a single power law rho \propto…