Early-stage star-forming cloud cores in Galactic Legacy Infrared Mid-Plane Survey (GLIMPSE) extended green objects (EGOs) as traced by organic species

Abstract

In order to investigate the physical and chemical properties of massive star-forming cores in the early stages, we analyse the excitation and abundance of four organic species, CH3OH, CH3OCH3, HCOOCH3 and CH3CH2CN, towards 29 extended green object (EGO) cloud cores that were observed by our previous single-dish spectral line survey. The EGO cloud cores are found to have similar methanol J3-J2 rotation temperatures of ~44 K, a typical linear size of ~0.036 pc and a typical beam-averaged methanol abundance of several 10-9 (the beam-corrected value could reach several 10-7). The abundances of the latter three species, normalized by that of methanol, are also found to be correlated across a large variety of clouds such as EGO cloud cores, hot corinos, massive hot cores and Galactic Centre clouds. The chemical properties of the EGO cloud cores lie between those of hot cores and hot corinos. However, the abundances and abundance ratios of the four species cannot be explained satisfactorily by recent chemical models, either among EGO cloud cores or among the various types of cloud core from literature.