The accretion history of high-mass stars: An ArTéMiS pilot study of Infrared Dark Clouds

Abstract

The mass growth of protostars is a central element to the determination of fundamental stellar population properties such as the initial mass function. Constraining the accretion history of individual protostars is therefore an important aspect of star formation research. The goal of the study presented here is to determine whether high-mass (proto)stars gain their mass from a compact (<0.1pc) fixed-mass reservoir of gas, often referred to as dense cores, in which they are embedded, or whether the mass growth of high-mass stars is governed by the dynamical evolution of the parsec-scale clump that typically surrounds them. To achieve this goal, we performed a 350micron continuum mapping of 11 infrared dark clouds, along side some of their neighbouring clumps, with the ArTéMiS camera on APEX. By identifying about 200 compact ArTéMiS sources, and matching them with Herschel Hi-GAL 70micron sources, we have been able to produce mass vs. temperature diagrams. We compare the nature (i.e. starless or protostellar) and location of the ArTéMiS sources in these diagrams with modelled evolutionary tracks of both core-fed and clump-fed accretion scenarios. We argue that the latter provide a better agreement with the observed distribution of high-mass star-forming cores. However, a robust and definitive conclusion on the question of the accretion history of high-mass stars requires larger number statistics.

23 pages, 44 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS

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• The SQUALO project (Star formation in QUiescent And Luminous Objects) I: clump-fed accretion mechanism in high-mass star-forming objects
• GASTON: Galactic Star Formation with NIKA2. Evidence for the mass growth of star-forming clumps
• The dynamic centres of infrared-dark clouds and the formation of cores
• ATOMS: ALMA Three-millimeter Observations of Massive Star-forming regions -XIII. Ongoing triggered star formation within clump-fed scenario found in the massive ($\sim 1500$ ${\mathrm{M}}_{\odot }$) clump
• ALMA-IMF XVI: Mass-averaged temperature of cores and protostellar luminosities in the ALMA-IMF protoclusters
• ALMA-IMF XVII -- Census and lifetime of high-mass prestellar cores in 14 massive protoclusters
• The initial magnetic criticality of prestellar cores
• Emergence of high-mass stars in complex fiber networks (EMERGE) V. From filaments to spheroids: the origin of the hub-filament systems
• The Rosetta Stone Project. II. The correlation between star formation efficiency and L/M indicator for the evolutionary stages of star-forming clumps in post-processed radiative magnetohydrodynamics simulations
• Differences in chemical evolution between isolated and embedded prestellar cores
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• Dense cores in the Seahorse infrared dark cloud: physical properties from modified blackbody fits to the far-infrared-submillimetre spectral energy distributions
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• Galactic Star Formation with NIKA2 (GASTON): Evidence of mass accretion onto dense clumps