Chemical modeling of internal photon-dominated regions surrounding deeply embedded HC/UCHII regions

TL;DR

This study models the chemistry of internal photon-dominated regions around embedded HII regions to identify molecular tracers of this evolutionary stage, revealing key molecules and the impact of initial conditions on chemical profiles.

Contribution

It introduces coupled astrochemical and radiative transfer models to simulate the chemical evolution of internal PDRs around hypercompact and ultracompact HII regions, highlighting potential tracers and the importance of initial abundances.

Findings

C+ and O trace internal PDRs but are currently unobservable.

Some molecules like C, N2H+, CN, and HCO are not good tracers.

Initial abundances significantly affect chemical profiles.

Abstract

We aim to investigate the chemistry of internal photon-dominated regions surrounding deeply embedded hypercompact and ultracompact HII regions. We search for specific tracers of this evolutionary stage of massive star formation that can be detected with current astronomical facilities. We modeled hot cores with embedded HC/UCHII regions, by coupling the astrochemical code Saptarsy to a radiative transfer framework obtaining the spatio-temporal evolution of abundances as well as time-dependent synthetic spectra. In these models where we focused on the internal PDR surrounding the HI region, the gas temperature is set to the dust temperature and we do not include dynamics thus the density structure is fixed. We compared this to hot molecular core models and studied the effect on the chemistry of the radiation field which is included in the HII region models only during the computation of abundances. In addition, we investigated the chemical evolution of the gas surrounding HII regions with models of different densities at the ionization front, different sizes of the ionized cavity and different initial abundances. We obtain the time evolution of synthetic spectra for a dozen of selected species as well as ratios of their integrated intensities. We find that some molecules such as C, N2H+, CN, and HCO do not trace the inner core and so are not good tracers to distinguish the HII/PDR regions to the HMCs phase. On the contrary, C+ and O trace the internal PDRs, in the two models starting with different initial abundances, but are unfortunately currently unobservable with the current achievable spatial resolution because of the very thin internal PDR (r < 100 AU). In addition, we find that the abundance profiles are highly affected by the choice of the initial abundances, hence the importance to properly define them.