Protostars and Planets VI, Heidelberg, July 15-20, 2013

Poster 1B021

FRAGMENTATION AND DEUTERATION IN MASSIVE STAR-FORMING REGIONS

Rodón, Javier A. (European Southern Observatory, Chile)
Beuther, Henrik (Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie, Germany)
Schilke, Peter (Universität Köln, Germany)
Zhang, Qizhou (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, USA)

Abstract:
In the last decade, we have started to spatially resolve the relatively small gas and dust condensations in high-mass star-forming regions that will eventually become a massive star or system. We call these condensations of sizes on the order of 0.01 pc \"cores\", and by estimating their masses we can construct the so-called Core Mass Function (CMF) of a region, to compare with the IMF and try to determine the evolutionary process from core to star. For massive star-forming regions, the relationship between the CMF and the IMF is not yet well understood. This is, among other factors, due to the fact that there are not many massive CMF determined. Even then, some of those few CMF seem to tell a story of evolution, by presenting different slopes than that of the Salpeter IMF while others, seem to be very similar to the IMF. But are we in fact observing regions at different evolutionary stages? Based on the work of Fontani et al. 2011, one way to address this would be by determining the deuteration fraction of those regions, since deuterated species are first released into the gas medium and then destroyed at the early stages of evolution. In this work we show CMFs and deuteration factors obtained for a group of massive star-forming regions with SMA, PdBI, and IRAM-30m observations. The CMFs show different slopes, and we explain the possible significance of the deuteration factors obtained on the evolution of the regions.

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