Surveys of clumps, cores, and condensations in Cygnus-X

Searching for circumstellar disks

¹ School of Astronomy and Space Science, Nanjing University, 163 Xianlin Avenue, Nanjing 210023, PR China
e-mail: kpqiu@nju.edu.cn
² Key Laboratory of Modern Astronomy and Astrophysics (Nanjing University), Ministry of Education, Nanjing 210023, PR China

Received: 28 April 2023
Accepted: 23 November 2023

Abstract

Context. Theories and models have suggested that circumstellar disks could channel material to the central protostar, and resist star formation feedback. Our current knowledge of the picture and role of disks around massive protostars is unclear because the observational evidence of these circumstellar disks is limited.

Aims. To investigate whether disk-mediated accretion is the primary mechanism in high-mass star formation, we have established a survey of a large sample of massive dense cores within a giant molecular cloud.

Methods. We used high angular resolution (~1.8″) observations with SMA to study the dust emission and molecular line emission of about 50 massive dense cores in Cygnus-X. At a typical distance of 1.4 kpc for Cygnus-X, these massive dense cores are resolved into ~2000 au condensations. We combined the CO outflow emission and gas kinematics traced by several high-density tracers to search for disk candidates.

Results. We extracted hundreds of dust condensations from the SMA 1.3 mm dust continuum emission. The CO data show bipolar or unipolar outflow signatures toward 49 dust condensations. Among them, only 27 sources are detected in dense gas tracers, which reveals the gas kinematics, and nine sources show evidence of rotating envelopes, suggesting the existence of embedded accretion disks. The position-velocity diagrams along the velocity gradient of all rotating condensations suggest that four condensations are possible to host Keplerian-like disks.

Conclusions. A detailed investigation of the 27 sources detected in dense gas tracers suggests that the nine disk candidates are at earlier evolutionary stages compared to the remaining 18 sources. Non-detection of rotating disks in our sample may be due to several factors, including an unknown inclination angle of the rotation axis and an early evolutionary stage of the central source, and the latter could be important, considering that young and powerful outflows could confuse the observational evidence for rotation. The detection rate of disk candidates in our sample is 1/3, which confirms that disk accretion is a viable mechanism for high-mass star formation, although it may not be the only one.