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Project Progress

Pedelty, Mundy, and Charnley performed Very Large Array (VLA) λ7mm observations of the hot molecular core in the low mass star formation region NGC 1333 IRAS 4A in November 2005. IRAS 4A is a still enshrouded in the dust and gas of the Perseus star formation region, approximately 220 pc away. This source is a Class 0 or extreme Class 1 object, which means that it is just forming a disk, and has been the subject of an extensive molecular survey by Mundy and co-investigator Blake. Millimeter continuum observations with the BIMA (Looney, Mundy, Welch, ApJ, 2000, 529, 477) showed IRAS 4A is binary, with sources A1 and A2 separated by ~400 AU. Recently Bottinelli et al. (ApJ, 2004, 615, 354) reported the detection of methyl cyanide, methyl formate, and formic acid using the IRAM single dish radio telescope, but with insufficient spatial resolution to determine whether the molecular emission was coming from source A1 or A2 or both. With the new VLA 7mm observations we were able to detect and image the prebiotic molecules formic acid and methyl formate in IRAS 4A with 1.6” spatial resolution. We detect formic acid in source A2, but not A1, while methyl formate is detected in both sources yet the line strength is at least 4x greater in source A1 (see Figure 1 below). These observations indicate that diversity exists in the chemical evolution in even adjacent and coeval low mass star formation regions.

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Publications/Presentations

Conference presentations: Poster presented to AbSciCon 2006 in Washington, DC. Abstract published in the journal Astrobiology: Pedelty JA, LG Mundy, and SB Charnley, VLA observations of organic molecules in low mass protostellar systems, Astrobiology, 6(1), 190, 2006.