The ALMA-QUARKS Survey: Detection of Two Extremely Dense Substructures in a Massive Prestellar Core
Abstract
Only a handful of massive starless core candidates have been discovered so far, but none of them have been fully confirmed. Within the MM1 clump in the filamentary infrared dark cloud G34.43+0.24 that was covered by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) ATOMS survey at Band 3 (∼2″, 6000 au) and the ALMA-QUARKS survey at Band 6 (∼0.″3, 900 au), two prestellar core candidates MM1-C and E1 with masses of 71 and 20 M _⊙ and radii of 2100–4400 au were discovered. The two cores show no obvious sign of star formation activities. In particular, MM1-C is a very promising massive prestellar core candidate with a total gas mass of 71 M _⊙ . Within MM1-C, we detected two extremely dense substructures, C1 and C2, as characterized by their high densities of ${n}_{{{\rm{H}}}_{2}}\sim {10}^{8\mbox{--}9}\,{\mathrm{cm}}^{-3}$ . Moreover, evidence of further fragmentation in C2 was also revealed. We have detected the primordial fragmentation in the earliest stage of massive star formation, and we speculate that MM1-C would be the birthplace of a massive multiple system. However, we cannot fully rule out the possibility that the massive prestellar core MM1-C will just form a cluster of low-mass stars if it undergoes further fragmentation.
Date
01-01-2024Author
Xiaofeng Mai
Tie Liu
Xunchuan Liu
Lei Zhu
Guido Garay
Paul F. Goldsmith
Mika Juvela
Hongli Liu
Emma Mannfors
Anandmayee Tej
Patricio Sanhueza
Shanghuo Li
Fengwei Xu
Enrique Vazquez Semadeni
Wenyu Jiao
Yaping Peng
T. Baug
Aiyuan Yang
Lokesh Dewangan
Leonardo Bronfman
Gilberto C. Gómez
Aina Palau
Chang Won Lee
Sheng-Li Qin
Ken’ichi Tatematsu
James O. Chibueze
Dongting Yang
Xing Lu
Qiuyi Luo
Qilao Gu
Namitha Issac
Suinan Zhang
Pak-Shing Li
Bo Zhang
L. Viktor Tóth