ALMASOP: Detection of Turbulence-induced Mass Assembly Shocks in Starless Cores

Abstract

Star formation is a series of mass assembly processes and starless cores; those cold and dense condensations in molecular clouds play a pivotal role as initial seeds of stars. With only a limited sample of known starless cores, however, the origin and growth of such stellar precursors had not been well characterized previously. Meanwhile, the recent discovery of CH3OH emission, which is generally associated with the desorbed icy mantle in warm regions, particularly at the periphery of starless cores, also remains puzzling. We present sensitive Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (Band 3) observations (at 3 mm) toward a sample of newly identified starless cores in the Orion molecular cloud. The spatially resolved images distinctly indicate that the observed CH3OH and N2H+ emission associated with these cores are morphologically anticorrelated and kinematically offset from each other. We postulate that the CH3OH emission highlights the desorption of icy mantle by shocks resulting from gas piling onto dense cores in the filaments traced by N2H+. Our magnetohydrodynamic simulations of star formation in turbulent clouds combined with radiative transfer calculations and imaging simulations successfully reproduced the observed signatures and reaffirmed the above scenario at work. Our result serves as an intriguing and exemplary illustration, a snapshot in time, of the dynamic star-forming processes in turbulent clouds. The results offer compelling insights into the mechanisms governing the growth of starless cores and the presence of gas-phase complex organic molecules associated with these cores.