Online Archive of University of Virginia Scholarship
Sulfur and Carbon in Protostellar Ices: SO₂/CH₄ Constraints in L48315 views
Author
El Abbar, Hanan, Astronomy, University of Virginia
Advisors
Cleeves, Ilse, AS-Astronomy (ASTR), University of Virginia
Abstract
Sulfur is known as one of the main elements necessary for life, but is also notoriously difficult to track through the stages of molecular cloud evolution. Using computational 1D chemical modeling of the class 0 protostar L483, this work aims to constrain the environmental conditions surrounding L483 such that the modeled chemical abundance ratios of SO₂/CH₄ and CH₄/H₂O match those obtained by observational data and other works. By creating 3D contour plots using a 1D disk chemistry routine, the effects of varying temperatures and chemical species initializations across a wide range can be assessed more comprehensively. Through this method, we find that the target SO₂/CH4 ratio value can be achieved in every case, but the target CH₄/H₂O ratio value is only obtained in two cases. This may imply that a substantial amount of methane was needed to be present in the molecular cloud that formed L483 to explain the relative abundances that we see.
El Abbar, Hanan. Sulfur and Carbon in Protostellar Ices: SO₂/CH₄ Constraints in L483. University of Virginia, Astronomy, BA (Bachelor of Arts), 2026-05-09, https://doi.org/10.18130/3r8j-0f65.
