Signs of outflow feedback from a nearby young stellar object on the protostellar envelope around HL Tauri

¹ European Southern Observatory (ESO), Karl-Schwarzschild-Str. 2, 85748 Garching, Germany
² Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, 11F of Astro-Math Bldg, 1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Rd, Taipei 10617, Taiwan
e-mail: hwyen@asiaa.sinica.edu.tw
³ Department of Physics and Astronomy, Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Kagoshima University, 1-21-35 Korimoto, Kagoshima, Kagoshima 890-0065, Japan
⁴ Department of Physics, National Taiwan University, No. 1, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Road, Taipei 106, Taiwan

Received: 8 September 2018
Accepted: 10 January 2019

Abstract

Aims. HL Tau is a Class I–II protostar embedded in an infalling and rotating envelope and possibly associated with a planet forming disk, and it is co-located in a 0.1 pc molecular cloud with two nearby young stellar objects with projected distance of ~20′′–30′′ (2800–4200 au) to HL Tau. Our observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) revealed two arc-like structures on a 1000 au scale connected to the disk, and their kinematics could not be explained with any conventional model of infalling and rotational motions. In this work, we investigate the nature of these arc-like structures connected to the HL Tau disk.

Methods. We carried out new observations in the ¹³CO and C¹⁸O (3–2; 2–1) lines with the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope and the IRAM 30m telescope, and obtained the data with the 7-m array of the Atacama Compact Array (ACA). With the single-dish, ACA, and ALMA data, we analyzed the gas motions on both 0.1 pc and 1000 au scales in the HL Tau region. We constructed new kinematical models of an infalling and rotating envelope with the consideration of relative motion between HL Tau and the envelope.

Results. By including the relative motion between HL Tau and its protostellar envelope, our kinematical model can explain the observed velocity features in the arc-like structures. The morphologies of the arc-like structures can also be explained with an asymmetric initial density distribution in our model envelope. In addition, our single-dish results support the scenario that HL Tau is located at the edge of a largescale (0.1 pc) expanding shell driven by the wind or outflow from XZ Tau, as suggested in the literature. The estimated expanding velocity of the shell is comparable to the relative velocity between HL Tau and its envelope in our kinematical model. These results hint that the largescale expanding motion likely impacts the protostellar envelope around HL Tau and affects its gas kinematics. We found that the mass infalling rate from the envelope onto the HL Tau disk can be decreased by a factor of two due to this impact by the largescale expanding shell.