Paper detail

Interplay between chemistry and dynamics in embedded protostellar disks

A fundamental part of the study of star formation is to place young stellar objects in an evolutionary sequence. Establishing a robust evolutionary classification scheme allows us not only to understand how the Sun was born but also to predict what kind of main sequence star a given protostar will become. Traditionally, low-mass young stellar objects are classified according to the shape of their SEDs. Such methods are however prone to misclassification due to degeneracy and do not constrain the temporal evolution. More recently, young stellar objects have been classified based on envelope, disk, and stellar masses determined from resolved images of their continuum and line emission at submillimeter wavelengths. Through detailed modeling of two Class I sources, we aim at determining accurate velocity profiles and explore the role of freeze-out chemistry in such objects. We present new Submillimeter Array observations of the continuum and HCO$^+$ line emission at 1.1 mm toward two protostars, IRS 63 and IRS 43 in the Ophiuchus star forming region. The sources are modeled in detail using dust radiation transfer to fit the SED and continuum images and line radiation transfer to produce synthetic position-velocity diagrams. We use a $χ^2$ search algorithm to find the best model fit to the data and to estimate the errors in the model variables. Our best fit models present disk, envelope and stellar masses as well as the HCO$^+$ abundance and inclination of both sources. We also identify a ring structure with a radius of about 200 AU in IRS 63. We find that freeze-out chemistry is important in IRS 63 but not for IRS 43. We show that the velocity field in IRS 43 is consistent with Keplerian rotation. Due to molecular depletion, it is not possible to draw a similar conclusion for IRS 63. We identify a ring shaped structure in IRS 63 on the same spatial scale as the disk outer radius.