Description
High-mass stars dominate the kinematics and energetics of the interstellar medium, and yet their initial stages are poorly known. In fact, high-mass stars are born in crowded, dense, and distant environments (infrared dark clouds) that pose significant observational challenges. In this work, we use a combination of several ALMA datasets to investigate the properties of the high-mass clump AG14.49, focusing on two aspects: the prestellar core population embedded in it and the clump-scale kinematics. By applying a dendrogram analysis to ALMA Band 7 data of oH2D+, we find 22 cores that are essentially low-mass and subvirial. Using Band 3 data of N2H+ (1-0) combined with a friend-of-friends algorithm to perform hierarchical clustering, we are able to dissect the complex 3D structure of this massive clump and to link kinematically the cores to their parental gas.
