Pristine composition or size evolution: Can current dust models reproduce emissivities observed in nearby protostars?

Abstract

Interstellar dust is a crucial asset in many astronomical observations. Characterising grains present in the dense gas and in star-forming environments is also key to constrain the pristine conditions for planetary formation. However, dust properties remain poorly characterised and are still debated: low dust emissivities observed in nearby protostars are not completely explained to this day. In this study, we aim to determine whether it is possible to retrieve the dust properties from multi-wavelength observations of the dust emission towards embedded protostars, and the extent to which current dust models can reproduce the observed values of the dust emissivity index in young protostars. We perform radiative transfer computations of the thermal dust emission from a model protostellar envelope, considering different dust optical properties commonly used in the community. This allows us to explore the effects of dust composition on the spectral index, to try and explain the variation in the emissivity index in nearby protostars observations. We find large variations in the spectral index as the sole result of different dust models, without the need for dust grain size evolution. However, our work does not allow us to reproduce the lowest emissivity index values found in some protostellar envelopes without including unexpectedly large millimetre-sized processed grains. We show that appropriate methods permits to measure the dust emissivity from observations of the spectral index at millimetre wavelengths with very little uncertainty. Variation in emissivity index between the different observed sources and the dust models most commonly used by the community implies that the intrinsic composition of dust is not sufficient to explain the lowest spectral index values. Thus, early dust evolution producing larger dust grains may have to be taken into account to obtain a complete picture.