Far‐Infrared Line Emission from Collapsing Protostellar Envelopes

Abstract

We present a theoretical model that computes the chemical evolution, thermal balance, and line emission from the collapsing gas of the envelopes that surround protostars. This is the First attempt to calculate self-consistently the line spectrum from the infalling gas with a model that includes dynamics, chemistry, heating and cooling, and radiative transfer. For the dynamics, we have adopted the Shu "inside-out" spherical collapse of an isothermal cloud valid for r ≥ rc, where the centrifugal radius rc ~ 1014–1015 cm. A time-dependent chemical code follows the chemical composition of the envelope during the collapse.