Luis Chavarría: Agua en Regiones de Formacion de Estrellas Masivas con HIFI

Luis Chavarría actualmente es postdoc en el Centro de Astrobiologia en Madrid. El obtuvo su doctorado en la Universidad de Chile en el año 2009.

En este articulo estudio la emisión de la molécula de agua en la region de formacion de estrellas masivas W3-IRS5. Los perfiles de las lineas de agua muestran que esta es excitada o absorvida en tres regiones distintas: outflow, envoltorio caliente o interno y envoltorio frio o externo.  A traves de un modelo simple en 1D, muestro que es posible reproducir las principales características de las lineas de agua. De esta manera, podemos estimar su abundancia con respecto al Hidrogeno y estudiar la dinámica del gas en este tipo de regiones.

Link al articulo.

"Water in massive star-forming regions: HIFI observations of W3 IRS5"
L. Chavarria et al., 2010.

Resumen (en ingles) 

We present Herschel observations of the water molecule in the massive star-forming region W3 IRS5. The o-H17O 110-101, p-H18O 111-000, p-H2O 22 202-111, p-H2O 111-000, o-H2O 221-212, and o-H2O 212-101 lines, covering a frequency range from 552 up to 1669 GHz, have been detected at high spectral resolution with HIFI. The water lines in W3 IRS5 show well-defined high-velocity wings that indicate a clear contribution by outflows. Moreover, the systematically blue-shifted absorption in the H2O lines suggests expansion, presumably driven by the outflow. No infall signatures are detected. The p-H2O 111-000 and o-H2O 212-101 lines show absorption from the cold material (T ~ 10 K) in which the high-mass protostellar envelope is embedded. One-dimensional radiative transfer models are used to estimate water abundances and to further study the kinematics of the region. We show that the emission in the rare isotopologues comes directly from the inner parts of the envelope (T > 100 K) where water ices in the dust mantles evaporate and the gas-phase abundance increases. The resulting jump in the water abundance (with a constant inner abundance of 10^{-4}) is needed to reproduce the o-H17O 110-101 and p-H18O 111-000 spectra in our models. We estimate water abundances of 10^{-8} to 10^{-9} in the outer parts of the envelope (T < 100 K). The possibility of two protostellar objects contributing to the emission is discussed.