Letter to the Editor

Detection of a high-mass prestellar core candidate in W43-MM1

¹ Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, IPAG, 38000 Grenoble, France
e-mail: thomas.nony@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr
² Departmento de Astronomia de Chile, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, Chile
³ AIM, CEA, CNRS, Université Paris-Saclay, Université Paris Diderot, Sorbonne Paris Cité, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France
⁴ OASU/LAB, Univ. de Bordeaux – CNRS/INSU, 36615 Pessac, France
⁵ School of Physics and Astronomy, Cardiff University, Queens Buildings, The Parade, Cardiff CF24 3AA, UK
⁶ Institut de RadioAstronomie Millimétrique (IRAM), Grenoble, France
⁷ LERMA, CNRS, Observatoire de Paris, École Normale Supérieure, 24 rue Lhomond, 75231 Paris Cedex 05, France
⁸ Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie, Auf dem Hügel 69, 53121 Bonn, Germany
⁹ Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Toronto, 60 St. George Street, Toronto, ON M5S 3H8, Canada

Received: 16 July 2018
Accepted: 27 September 2018

Abstract

Aims. To constrain the physical processes that lead to the birth of high-mass stars it is mandatory to study the very first stages of their formation. We search for high-mass analogs of low-mass prestellar cores in W43-MM1.

Methods. We conducted a 1.3 mm ALMA mosaic of the complete W43-MM1 cloud, which has revealed numerous cores with ~2000 au FWHM sizes. We investigated the nature of cores located at the tip of the main filament, where the clustering is minimum. We used the continuum emission to measure the core masses and the ¹³CS(5-4) line emission to estimate their turbulence level. We also investigated the prestellar or protostellar nature of these cores by searching for outflow signatures traced by CO(2-1) and SiO(5-4) line emission, and for molecular complexity typical of embedded hot cores.

Results. Two high-mass cores of ~1300 au diameter and ~60 M_⊙ mass are observed to be turbulent but gravitationally bound. One drives outflows and is associated with a hot core. The other core, W43-MM1#6, does not yet reveal any star formation activity and thus is an excellent high-mass prestellar core candidate.