Infall and Outflow Towards High-mass Starless Clump Candidates

Abstract

The evolutionary sequence for high-mass star formation starts with massive starless clumps that go on to form protostellar, young stellar objects and then compact HII regions. While there are many examples of the three later stages, the very early stages have proved to be elusive. We follow-up a sample of 110 mid-infrared dark clumps selected from the ATLASGAL catalogue with the IRAM telescope in an effort to identify a robust sample of massive starless clumps. We have used the HCO+ (1-0) and HNC (1-0) transitions to identify clumps associated with infall motion and the SiO (2-1) transition to identity outflow candidates. We have found blue asymmetric line profile in 65% of the sample, and have measured the infall velocities and mass infall rates (0.6-$36\times 10^{-3}$ Msun/yr) for 33 of these clumps. We find a trend for the mass infall rate decreasing with an increase of bolometric luminosity to clump mass i.e. star formation within the clumps evolves. Using the SiO 2-1 line, we have identified good outflow candidates. Combining the infall and outflow tracers reveals that 67% of quiescent clumps are already undergoing gravitational collapse or are associated with star formation; these clumps provide us with our best opportunity to determined the initial conditions and study the earliest stages of massive star formation. Finally, we provide an overview of a systematic high-resolution ALMA study of quiescent clumps selected that allows us to develop a detailed understanding of earliest stages and their subsequent evolution.

10 pages and 7 figures

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Cited by in corpus (3)

• A survey of SiO $J=$ 1 -- 0 emission toward massive star-forming regions
• Dense Molecular Clumps with Large Blue Asymmetries: Evidence for Collapse
• ATLASGAL-selected high-mass clumps in the inner Galaxy: XI. Morphology and kinematics of warm inner envelopes