Neutral and Ionized Hydrides in Star-forming Regions -- Observations with Herschel/HIFI

TL;DR

This study uses Herschel/HIFI observations to analyze hydrides in star-forming regions, demonstrating that far UV irradiation significantly influences molecular abundances, especially CH+, which serves as an effective tracer of FUV effects.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed comparison of hydride observations with advanced 2D models including FUV irradiation effects in star-forming regions.

Findings

FUV irradiation greatly enhances CH+ abundance by over 5 orders of magnitude.

HIFI observations support 2D FUV irradiation models, confirming their role in molecular chemistry.

CH+ is identified as a reliable tracer of FUV influence in star-forming environments.

Abstract

The cosmic abundance of hydrides depends critically on high-energy UV, X-ray, and particle irradiation. Here we study hydrides in star-forming regions where irradiation by the young stellar object can be substantial, and density and temperature can be much enhanced over interstellar values. Lines of OH, CH, NH, SH and their ions OH+, CH+, NH+, SH+, H2O+, and H3O+ were observed in star-forming regions by the HIFI spectrometer onboard the Herschel Space Observatory. Molecular column densities are derived from observed ground-state lines, models, or rotational diagrams. We report here on two prototypical high-mass regions, AFGL 2591 and W3 IRS5, and compare them to chemical calculations making assumptions on the high-energy irradiation. A model assuming no ionizing protostellar emission is compared with (i) a model assuming strong protostellar X-ray emission and (ii) a two-dimensional (2D) model including emission in the far UV (FUV, 6 -- 13.6 eV) irradiating the outflow walls that separate the outflowing gas and infalling envelope material. We confirm that the effect of FUV in two dimensional models with enlarged irradiated surfaces is clearly noticeable. A molecule that is very sensitive to FUV irradiation is CH+, enhanced in abundance by more than 5 orders of magnitude. The HIFI observations of CH+ lines agree with the two-dimensional FUV model by Bruderer et al. which computes abundances, non-LTE excitation and line radiative transfer.{Ref 20} It is concluded that CH+ is a good FUV tracer in star-forming regions. The effect of potential X-ray irradiation is not excluded, but cannot be demonstrated by the present data.