Fully Sampled Maps of Ices and Silicates in Front of Cepheus A East with Spitzer
P. Sonnentrucker, D. A. Neufeld, P. A. Gerakines, E. A. Bergin, G. J., Melnick, W. J. Forrest, J. L. Pipher, D. C. B. Whittet

TL;DR
This study provides the first fully sampled maps of interstellar ices and silicates in Cepheus A East, revealing their distribution, abundance, and thermal processing, with implications for star formation environments.
Contribution
It presents the first comprehensive spatial maps of CO2 and H2O ices and silicates in Cepheus A East, including detailed ice profile analysis and thermal history insights.
Findings
Column densities peak near HW2 protostar.
Ice abundances are relatively constant across the region.
Presence of both low-temperature and high-temperature ice components.
Abstract
We report the first fully sampled maps of the distribution of interstellar CO2 ices, H2O ices and total hydrogen nuclei, as inferred from the 9.7 micron silicate feature, toward the star-forming region Cepheus A East with the IRS instrument onboard the Spitzer Space Telescope. We find that the column density distributions for these solid state features all peak at, and are distributed around, the location of HW2, the protostar believed to power one of the outflows observed in this star-forming region. A correlation between the column density distributions of CO2 and water ice with that of total hydrogen indicates that the solid state features we mapped mostly arise from the same molecular clumps along the probed sight lines. We therefore derive average CO2 ice and water ice abundances with respect to the total hydrogen column density of X(CO2)_ice~1.9x10^-5 and X(H2O)_ice~7.5x10^-5.…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
