APE: An analytical protostellar environment to provide physical conditions to chemical models and synthetic observations

TL;DR

The paper introduces APE, a comprehensive code that models physical conditions in protostellar environments to facilitate chemical simulations and synthetic observations, aiding interpretation of astronomical data.

Contribution

APE integrates physical protostellar models with chemical and radiative transfer tools, enabling detailed simulations and synthetic observations of protostellar systems.

Findings

Produced density and temperature maps of protostellar systems.

Generated chemical abundance maps for key molecules.

Simulated ALMA observations matching observed features.

Abstract

Chemical modeling and synthetic observations are powerful methods to interpret observations, both requiring a knowledge of the physical conditions. In this paper, we present the Analytical Protostellar Environment (APE) code, which aims at making chemical simulations and synthetic observations accessible. APE contains a physical model of protostellar evolution (including the central object, the envelope, the protoplanetary disk and the outflow) as well as interfaces to publicly available codes to perform chemical simulations, radiative transfer calculations, and synthetic interferometry imaging. APE produces density and temperature maps of protostellar systems. The code can also follow individual particles throughout their journey in a collapsing core. APE includes a treatment of the dust grain size-distribution to compute opacities self-consistently for subsequent radiative transfer. We show an example of application of APE by computing chemical abundance maps of CO, CN, CS, H2CO, and CH3OH in a Class I protostellar system. We also performed synthetic ALMA observations of their molecular emission assuming an edge-on source inclination. The moment 0 maps of CO, CS, and H2CO display an X-shaped emission similar to what is observed toward the Class I source IRAS 04302+2247.