High-mass star formation on Galactic scales : a search for the youngest high-mass protostars

Séminaire IPAG de Timea Csengeri (MPI Bonn), jeudi 1er décembre 2016 à 11h00, salle Manuel Forestini IPAG

The origin of the highest mass stars is still an enigma in modern astrophysics. Only massive clumps, at the onset of star formation, can reveal the initial conditions and shed light on the necessary physical processes leading to their formation. The 870 micron ATLASGAL survey of the inner Galaxy is ideally suited to search for massive clumps still at their early evolutionary stage. Based on ATLASGAL, we identified the complete sample of infrared quiet massive clumps located at a distance closer than 5 kpc. I will present results from an ALMA follow-up study to search for embedded protostars in this sample of young massive clumps. ALMA reveals that their fragmentation properties are not consistent with pure thermal processes and that at the early stage of massive clumps fragmentation is limited to a few number of very massive cores showing a significant concentration of mass at small scales (Csengeri et al., 2016b, subm). This study uncovers a significant sample of the so far known highest mass Class 0 like protostars.