Chronology of Episodic Accretion in Protostars—An ALMA Survey of the CO and H2O Snowlines

Abstract

Abstract Episodic accretion has been used to explain the wide range of protostellar luminosities, but its origin and influence on the star-forming process are not yet fully understood. We present an ALMA survey of N2H+ (1−0) and HCO+ (3−2) toward 39 Class 0 and Class I sources in the Perseus molecular cloud. N2H+ and HCO+ are destroyed via gas-phase reactions with CO and H2O, respectively, thus tracing the CO and H2O snowline locations. A snowline location at a much larger radius than that expected from the current luminosity suggests that an accretion burst has occurred in the past that has shifted the snowline outward. We identified 18/18 Class 0 and 9/10 Class I post-burst sources from N2H+ and 7/17 Class 0 and 1/8 Class I post-burst sources from HCO+. The accretion luminosities during the past bursts are found to be ∼10–100 L ⊙. This result can be interpreted as either evolution of burst frequency or disk evolution. In the former case, assuming that refreeze-out timescales are 1000 yr for H2O and 10,000 yr for CO, we found that the intervals between bursts increase from 2400 yr in the Class 0 stage to 8000 yr in the Class I stage. This decrease in the burst frequency may reflect that fragmentation is more likely to occur at an earlier evolutionary stage when the young stellar object is more prone to instability.