Nitrogen fractionation towards a pre-stellar core traces isotope-selective photodissociation

TL;DR

This study investigates nitrogen isotope ratios in a pre-stellar core, revealing that isotope-selective photodissociation influences nitrogen fractionation, which varies with environmental exposure to interstellar radiation, impacting our understanding of pre-biotic chemistry.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed map of $^{14}$N/$^{15}$N ratios in a pre-stellar core, demonstrating environmental effects on nitrogen fractionation due to isotope-selective photodissociation.

Findings

$^{15}$N-fractionation varies across the core, increasing in regions exposed to radiation.

$^{14}$N/$^{15}$N ratio decreases towards the southern edge of L1544.

Environmental exposure influences nitrogen isotope ratios in pre-stellar cores.

Abstract

Isotopologue abundance ratios are important to understand the evolution of astrophysical objects and ultimately the origins of a planetary system like our own. Being nitrogen a fundamental ingredient of pre-biotic material, understanding its chemistry and inheritance is of fundamental importance to understand the formation of the building blocks of life. We present here single-dish observations of the ground state rotational transitions of the $^{13}$C and $^{15}$N isotopologues of HCN, HNC and CN with the IRAM 30m telescope. We analyse their column densities and compute the $^{14}$N/$^{15}$N ratio map for HCN. The $^{15}$N-fractionation of CN and HNC is computed towards different offsets across L1544. The $^{15}$N-fractionation map of HCN shows a clear decrease of the $^{14}$N/$^{15}$N ratio towards the southern edge of L1544, where carbon chain molecules present a peak, strongly suggesting that isotope-selective photodissociation has a strong effect on the fractionation of nitrogen across pre-stellar cores. The $^{14}$N/$^{15}$N ratio in CN measured towards four positions across the core also shows a decrease towards the South-East of the core, while HNC shows opposite behaviour. The uneven illumination of the pre-stellar core L1544 provides clear evidence that $^{15}$N-fractionation of HCN and CN is enhanced toward the region more exposed to the interstellar radiation field. Isotope-selective photodissociation of N$_2$ is then a crucial process to understand $^{15}$N fractionation, as already found in protoplanetary disks. Therefore, the $^{15}$N-fractionation in pre-stellar material is expected to change depending on the environment within which pre-stellar cores are embedded. The $^{12}$CN/$^{13}$CN ratio also varies across the core, but its variation does not affect our conclusions on the effect of the environment on the fractionation of nitrogen.