| Authors : | Dipen Sahu, Sheng-Yuan Liu, Doug Johnstone, Tie Liu ,4 Neal J. Evans II, Naomi Hirano,
Ken’ichi Tatematsu, James Di Francesco, Chin-Fei Lee, Kee-Tae Kim, Somnath Dutta, Shih-Ying Hsu, Shanghuo Li, Qiu-Yi Luo, Patricio Sanhueza, Hsien Shang, Alessio Traficante, Mika Juvela, Chang Won Lee, David J. Eden, Paul F. Goldsmith , Leonardo Bronfman, Woojin Kwon, Jeong-Eun Lee, Yi-Jehng Kuan and Isabelle Ristorcelli |
| Abstract : | Starless cores represent the initial stage of evolution toward (proto)star formation, and a subset of them, known as prestellar cores, with high density (\similar \e6 \cmq or higher) and being centrally concentrated are expected to be embryos of (proto)stars. Determining the density profile of prestellar cores, therefore provides an important opportunity to gauge the initial conditions of star formation. In this work, we perform rigorous modeling to estimate the density profiles of three nearly spherical prestellar cores among a sample of five highly dense cores detected by our recent observations. We employed multi-scale observational data of the (sub)millimeter dust continuum emission including those obtained by SCUBA-2 on the JCMT with a resolution of ~ 5600 au and by multiple ALMA observations with a resolution as high as ~ 480 au. We are able to consistently reproduce the observed multi-scale dust continuum images of the cores with a simple prescribed density profile, which bears an inner region of flat density and a \rsq profile toward the outer region. By utilizing the peak density and the size of the inner flat region as a proxy for the dynamical stage of the cores, we find that the three modeled cores are most likely unstable and prone to collapse. The sizes of the inner flat regions, as compact as ~ 500 au, likely signify them being the most evolved prestellar cores known to date. |
