The ALMA Survey of 70 {\mu}m Dark High-mass Clumps in Early Stages (ASHES). VI. The core-scale CO-depletion

TL;DR

This study investigates CO depletion in high-mass star-forming regions using ALMA data, revealing that core-scale CO depletion alone cannot distinguish prestellar from protostellar cores, but correlates with overall star formation evolution.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of CO depletion factors at the core scale in high-mass star-forming regions, highlighting their limitations and correlations with evolutionary indicators.

Findings

Average CO depletion factor increases from prestellar to protostellar stages.

Core-scale CO depletion is primarily dependent on gas density, not temperature.

Clump-averaged CO depletion correlates with star formation evolutionary stage.

Abstract

Studying the physical and chemical properties of cold and dense molecular clouds is crucial for the understanding of how stars form. Under the typical conditions of infrared dark clouds, CO is removed from the gas phase and trapped on to the surface of dust grains by the so-called depletion process. This suggests that the CO depletion factor ($f_{\rm D}$) can be a useful chemical indicator for identifying cold and dense regions (i.e., prestellar cores). We have used the 1.3 mm continuum and C$^{18}$O(2-1) data observed at the resolution of $\sim$5000 au in the ALMA Survey of 70 $\mu$m Dark High-mass Clumps in Early Stages (ASHES) to construct averaged maps of $f_{\rm D}$ in twelve clumps to characterise the earliest stages of the high-mass star formation process. The average $f_{\rm D}$ determined for 277 of the 294 ASHES cores follows an unexpected increase from the prestellar to the protostellar stage. If we exclude the temperature effect due to the slight variations in the NH$_3$ kinetic temperature among different cores, we explain this result as a dependence primarily on the average gas density, which increases in cores where protostellar conditions prevail. This shows that $f_{\rm D}$ determined in high-mass star-forming regions at the core scale is insufficient to distinguish among prestellar and protostellar conditions for the individual cores, and should be complemented by information provided by additional tracers. However, we confirm that the clump-averaged $f_{\rm D}$ values correlates with the luminosity-to-mass ratio of each source, which is known to trace the evolution of the star formation process.