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Synthetic observations of first hydrostatic cores in collapsing low-mass dense cores II. Simulated ALMA dust emission maps

First hydrostatic cores are predicted by theories of star formation, but their existence has never been demonstrated convincingly by (sub)millimeter observations. Furthermore, the multiplicity at the early phases of the star formation process is poorly constrained. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we seek to provide predictions of ALMA dust continuum emission maps from early Class 0 objects. Second, we show to what extent ALMA will be able to probe the fragmentation scale in these objects. Following our previous paper (Commerçon et al. 2012, hereafter paper I), we post-process three state-of-the-art radiation-magneto-hydrodynamic 3D adaptive mesh refinement calculations to compute the emanating dust emission maps. We then produce synthetic ALMA observations of the dust thermal continuum from first hydrostatic cores. We present the first synthetic ALMA observations of dust continuum emission from first hydrostatic cores. We analyze the results given by the different bands and configurations and we discuss for which combinations of the two the first hydrostatic cores would most likely be observed. We also show that observing dust continuum emission with ALMA will help in identifying the physical processes occurring within collapsing dense cores. If the magnetic field is playing a role, the emission pattern will show evidence of a pseudo-disk and even of a magnetically driven outflow, which pure hydrodynamical calculations cannot reproduce. The capabilities of ALMA will enable us to make significant progress towards understanding fragmentation at the early Class 0 stage and discovering first hydrostatic cores.