Speaker
Description
Hot corinos, central planet-forming regions of Solar-like protostars enriched in interstellar Complex Organic Molecules (iCOMs), are the likely analogues of the early Solar System.
Deceivingly, after almost 20 years of hunting, only less than twenty hot corinos are known. Surprisingly, many of them are binaries with the two components showing different millimeter molecular spectra. There are two possible explanations for why hot corinos are so difficult to find and why the millimeter spectra of coeval objects are so different: 1) the dust is so optically thick that hides the molecular lines; 2) the different observed spectra reflect an intrinsic chemical diversity probably due to the different composition of the grain mantles, formed in the prestellar phase.
In order to test and verify these two possibilities, centimeter observations are the key as i) we can observe iCOMs at wavelengths where the dust opacity is negligible; ii) we can simultaneously observe two major grain mantle components, methanol (CH$_3$OH, also the simplest iCOMs) and ammonia (NH$_3$). With pilot projects performed using JVLA observations of CH$_3$OH and NH$_3$ toward a sample of objects in Perseus, we could demonstrate that indeed dust hides the hot corino with the largest dust content, that abundances derived at sub-mm regimes can be severely underestimated, and that ices can be different. These studies, that I will present in this contribution, pave the way to the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) observatory that is the perfect and only facility capable to overcome the current limits, thanks to its high sensitivity and high angular resolution, as it will allow to observe more complex iCOMs with abundances lower than the CH$_3$OH one (of at least few order of magnitude) at small angular scales ($<$10 au) fully sampling the planet-forming hot corino region.
| Reasearch area | Cradle of Life |
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