The Physical Properties of High-Mass Star-Forming Clumps: A Systematic Comparison of Molecular Tracers

TL;DR

This study systematically compares molecular tracers in high-mass star-forming clumps, revealing how their excitation conditions relate to physical properties and highlighting the importance of tracer selection in such analyses.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of multiple molecular tracers in high-mass star-forming regions, emphasizing the impact of excitation density on derived physical properties.

Findings

N2H+ emission shows spatial differentiation from dust in luminous cores.

Molecular tracers with higher effective excitation densities correlate better with dust continuum.

Clump sizes are anti-correlated with the excitation densities of tracers.

Abstract

We present observations of HCO+ and H^13CO+, N2H+, HCS+, HCN and HN^13C, SO and ^34SO, CCH, SO_2, and CH_3OH-E towards a sample of 27 high-mass clumps coincident with water maser emission. All transitions are observed with or convolved to nearly identical resolution (30"), allowing for inter-comparison of the clump properties derived from the mapped transitions. We find N2H+ emission is spatially differentiated compared to the dust and the other molecules towards a few very luminous cores (10 of 27) and the N2H+ integrated intensity does not correlate well with dust continuum flux. We calculate the effective excitation density, n_eff, the density required to excite a 1 K line in T_kin=20 K gas for each molecular tracer. The intensity of molecular tracers with larger effective excitation densities (n_eff > 10^5 cm^-3) appear to correlate more strongly with the submillimeter dust continuum intensity. The median sizes of the clumps are anti-correlated with the n_eff of the tracers (which span more than three orders of magnitude). Virial mass is not correlated with n_eff, especially where the lines are optically thick as the linewidths may be broadened significantly by non-virial motions. The median mass surface density and median volume density of the clumps is correlated with n_eff indicating the importance of understanding the excitation conditions of the molecular tracer when deriving the average properties of an ensemble of cores.