Hot Cores in Magellanic Clouds

Abstract

Abstract We have studied the chemistry of molecules through complex organic molecules (COMs) in complexity in conditions resembling galactic hot molecular cores in the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds using a gas-grain network. To the best of our knowledge, there have been no previous such quantitative studies of hot core chemistry in these low metallicity, dust-poor galaxies. We utilized a physical model that consists of an initial isothermal collapse, followed by a warm-up phase to hot core conditions. Four different temperatures—10, 15, 20, and 25 K—were used for the isothermal collapse phase, considering the fact that these galaxies might have higher dust temperatures in cold regions than observed in the Milky Way. We found that for some abundant species, such as CO and water, hot core abundances are consistent with the reduced elemental abundances of the LMC and SMC. For other less abundant species, such as CH4 and HCN, the calculated abundances are larger when compared with elemental abundances, whereas for species like ammonia they are lower. Our calculations show that some COMs can also be formed in reasonable quantity for hot cores in the Magellanic Clouds when the grain temperature is lower than 25 K. Our results can be compared with recent observations of the hot cores in the high-mass young stellar object (YSO) ST11 and regions A1 and B3 of the star-forming source N113 in the LMC. Model results are in reasonable agreement with the observed abundances and upper limits.