A new look at sulphur chemistry in hot cores and corinos

TL;DR

This paper reviews sulphur chemistry in hot cores, emphasizing the impact of initial conditions and modeling approaches on sulphur species abundances, which vary significantly across different models and observations.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of sulphur chemistry in hot cores and compares static and dynamic models to understand their influence on sulphur abundance predictions.

Findings

Pre-collapse chemical composition critically influences sulphur chemistry.

Differences between static and dynamic models can reach six orders of magnitude in predicted abundances.

Model choice significantly affects astrochemical predictions and interpretations.

Abstract

Sulphur-bearing species are often used to probe the evolution of hot cores since their abundances are particularly sensitive to physical and chemical variations. However, the chemistry of sulphur is not well understood in these regions, notably because observations of several hot cores displayed a large variety of sulphur compositions, and because the reservoir of sulphur in dense clouds, in which hot cores form, is still poorly constrained. In order to help disentangled its complexity, we present a fresh comprehensive review of sulphur chemistry in hot cores along with a study of its sensibility to temperature and pre-collapse chemical composition. In parallel, we analyse the discrepencies that result from the use of two different types of models (static and dynamic) to highlight the sensitivity to the choice of model to be used in astrochemical studies. Our results show that the pre-collapse chemical composition is a critical parameter for sulphur chemistry in hot cores and could explain the different sulphur compositions observed. We also report that differences in abundances for a given species between the static and dynamic models can reach six orders of magnitude in the hot core, which reveals the key role of the choice of model in astrochemical studies.