Can radial temperature profiles be inferred using NH3 (1, 1) and (2, 2) observations?

Abstract

ABSTRACT A number of works infer radial temperature profiles of envelopes surrounding young stellar objects using several rotational transitions in a pixel-by-pixel or azimuthally averaged basis. However, in many cases the assumption that the rotational temperature is constant along the line of sight is made, while this is not the case when a partially resolved envelope, assumed to be spherically symmetric, is used to obtain values of temperature for different projected radii. This kind of analysis (homogeneous analysis) is intrinsically inconsistent. By using a spherical envelope model to interpret NH3 (1,1) and (2,2) observations, we tested how robust it is to infer radial temperature profiles of an envelope. The temperature and density of the model envelope are power laws of radius, but the density can be flat for an inner central part. The homogeneous analysis was applied to obtain radial temperature profiles, and resulted that for small projected radii, where the optical depth of the lines is high, the homogeneous temperature can be much higher than the actual envelope temperature. In general, for larger projected radii, both the temperature and the temperature power-law index can be underestimated by as much as 40 per cent, and 0.15, respectively. We applied this study to the infrared dark cloud G14.225–0.506 for which the radial temperature profile was previously derived from the dust emission at submillimetre wavelengths and the spectral energy distribution. As expected, the homogeneous analysis underestimated both the temperature and the temperature power-law index.