2025/07/14 by Tung, Ngo-Duy, Traficante, Alessio, Lebreuilly, Ugo +13
#Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) #FOS: Physical sciences #Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM) #Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2507.09936
Context. The evolution of massive star-forming clumps that are progenitors of high-mass young stellar objects are often classified based on a variety of observational indicators ranging from near-infrared to radio wavelengths. Among them, the ratio of the bolometric luminosity to the mass of their envelope, L/M, has been observationally diagnosed as a good indicator for the evolutionary classification of parsec-scale star-forming clumps in the Galaxy. Aims. We developed the Rosetta Stone project\unicodex2013an end-to-end framework designed to enable an accurate comparison between simulations and observations for investigating the formation and evolution of massive clumps. In this study, we calibrate the L/M indicator in relation to the star formation efficiency (SFE) and the clump age, as derived from our suite of simulations. Methods. We performed multi-wavelength radiative transfer post-processing of radiative magnetohydrodynamics (RMHD) simulations of the collapse of star-forming clumps fragmenting into protostars. We generated synthetic observations to obtain far-infrared emission from 70 to 500 μm, as was done in the Hi-GAL survey, and at 24 μm in the MIPSGAL survey, which were then used to build the spectral energy distributions (SEDs) and estimate the L/M parameter. An additional 1.3 mm wavelength in ALMA Band 6 was also produced for the comparison with observational data. We applied observational techniques\unicodex2013commonly employed by observers\unicodex2013to the synthetic data in order to derive the corresponding physical parameters. Results. We find a correlation between L/M and the SFE, with a power-law form L/M∝ \rm SFE^1.20+0.02-0.02. This correlation is independent of the mass of the clumps and the choice of initial conditions of the simulations in which they formed. (Abridged)