Disk Wind Feedback from High-mass Protostars. III. Synthetic CO Line Emission

Journal article, 2024

To test theoretical models of massive star formation it is important to compare their predictions with observed systems. To this end, we conduct CO molecular line radiative transfer post-processing of 3D magnetohydrodynamic simulations of various stages in the evolutionary sequence of a massive protostellar core, including its infall envelope and disk wind outflow. Synthetic position-position-velocity cubes of various transitions of 12CO, 13CO, and C18O emission are generated. We also carry out simulated Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations of this emission. We compare the mass, momentum, and kinetic energy estimates obtained from molecular lines to the true values, finding that the mass and momentum estimates can have uncertainties of up to a factor of 4. However, the kinetic energy estimated from molecular lines is more significantly underestimated. Additionally, we compare the mass outflow rate and momentum outflow rate obtained from the synthetic spectra with the true values. Finally, we compare the synthetic spectra with real examples of ALMA-observed protostars and determine the best-fitting protostellar masses and outflow inclination angles. We then calculate the mass outflow rate and momentum outflow rate for these sources, finding that both rates agree with theoretical protostellar evolutionary tracks.