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

Poster 1S043

The thermal structure of low-mass cloud cores

Launhardt, Ralf (MPIA)
Stutz, Amelia (MPIA)
Schmiedecke, Anika (Univ. Cologne)
Henning, Thomas (MPIA)
Krause, Oliver (MPIA)
Balog, Zoltan (MPIA)
Beuther, Henrik (MPIA)
Kainulainen, Jouni (MPIA)
Linz, Hendrik (MPIA)
Lippok, Nils (MPIA)
Nielbock, Markus (MPIA)
Ragan, Sarah (MPIA)
Schmalzl, Markus (Univ. Leiden)
Shirley, Yancy (Steward Observatory, Tuscon)
Steinacker, Juergen (IPAG Grenoble)

Abstract:
The evolution of the temperature and density structure of star-forming cloud cores is one of the key aspects in protostellar collapse models. Yet this structure, in particular the temperature, is not well-constrained observationally. In the framework of the EPoS Herschel key project, we observed the NIR extinction and FIR through mm dust emission from selected isolated nearby starless and protostellar cloud cores. Based on these data, we reconstruct the full dust temperature and density structure of the cores. We find that the thermal structure of all globules is completely dominated by external heating through the ISRF and moderate shielding by thin extended halos. All globules have warm outer envelopes (14–20 K) and colder dense interiors (7–11 K) with column densities of up to 10^23 cm^-2 and central volume densities of a few 10^5 cm^-3 (starless cores). The protostars embedded in some of the globules raise the local temperature of the dense cores only within radii out to about 5000 AU, but do not significantly affect the overall thermal balance of the globules.

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