Carbon Dioxide in Star-forming Regions

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We consider the gas-phase chemistry of CO2 molecules in active regions. We show that CO2 molecules evaporated from dust in hot cores cannot be efficiently destroyed and are in fact copiously produced in cooler gas. When CO2-rich ices are sputtered in strong MHD shock waves, the increase in atomic hydrogen, due to H2 dissociation by ion-neutral streaming, means that CO2 can be depleted by factors of approximately 500 from its injected abundance. We find that a critical shock speed exists at higher preshock densities below which CO2 molecules can be efficiently sputtered but survive in the postshock gas. These calculations offer an explanation for the low gas/solid CO2 ratios detected by the Infrared Space Observatory in star-forming cores as being due to shock destruction followed by partial reformation in warm gas. The presence of high abundances of CO2 in the strongly shocked Galactic center clouds Sgr B2 and Sgr A also find a tentative explanation in this scenario. Shock activity plays an important role in determining the chemistry of star-forming regions, and we suggest that most hot cores are in fact shocked cores.