Speaker
Thomas Gerner
(MPIA)
Description
Understanding the chemical evolution of young (high-mass) star-forming regions is a central topic in star formation research. The chemistry is employed as a unique tool: 1) to investigate the underlying physical processes and 2) to characterize the evolution of the chemical composition. With these aims in mind, we observed a sample of 59 high-mass star-forming regions at different evolutionary stages varying from the early starless phase of Infrared Dark Clouds (IRDC) to High Mass Protostellar Objects (HMPO) to Hot Molecular Cores (HMC) and, finally, Ultra Compact HII regions (UCHII) at 1mm and 3mm with the IRAM 30m telescope. We determined their large-scale chemical abundances and column densities and found that the chemical composition evolves along with the evolutionary stages.
We modeled the chemical evolution in these environments, using a 1D physical model where density and temperature vary from stage to stage coupled with an advanced gas-grain chemical model. This helped us to constrain physical parameters of these clouds such as the temperature and provided us with chemical ages for each phase.
Author
Thomas Gerner
(MPIA)