Molecule-dependent Abundance Behavior of Oxygen-bearing Complex Organics in High-Mass Star-Forming Regions: A Uniform 50-source Survey

Xuefang Xu; Mingwei He; Qian Gou; Jiao He; Junzhi Wang; Donghui Quan; Di Li; Laurent Pagani; Juan Li; Guoming Zhao; Chunguo Duan; Yang Lu; Luyao Zou

arXiv · 2607.16734

Molecule-dependent Abundance Behavior of Oxygen-bearing Complex Organics in High-Mass Star-Forming Regions: A Uniform 50-source Survey

Xuefang Xu·Mingwei He·Qian Gou·Jiao He·Junzhi Wang·Donghui Quan·Di Li·Laurent Pagani·Juan Li·Guoming Zhao·Chunguo Duan·Yang Lu·Luyao Zou

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Abstract

We present a uniform IRAM-30\,m survey analysis of four oxygen-bearing complex organic molecules (COMs), methanol (CH$_3$OH), acetaldehyde (CH$_3$CHO), methyl formate (CH$_3$OCHO), and dimethyl ether (CH$_3$OCH$_3$), toward 50 high-mass star-forming regions (HMSFRs) associated with 6.7\,GHz methanol masers. Column densities were derived through a homogeneous rotation-diagram approach, with CH$_3$CN used as a proxy excitation-temperature reference when needed. In CH$_3$OH-normalized abundance-ratio space, CH$_3$OCHO/CH$_3$OH and CH$_3$OCH$_3$/CH$_3$OH show the strongest pairwise correlation, whereas the correlations involving CH$_3$CHO are weaker. No clear monotonic trends are found with Galactocentric distance or beam-averaged H$_2$ column density. Comparison with previous observations places the CH$_3$OCHO--CH$_3$OCH$_3$ behavior within the range of earlier abundance-ratio measurements, while CH$_3$CHO shows larger inter-study variation. A representative warm-up chemical model is used only for qualitative comparison with the observed abundance ranges, which are most closely matched during the decline from the post-desorption abundance peaks in the model. These results provide homogeneous beam-averaged abundance-ratio constraints for common O-bearing COMs in high-mass star-forming regions and show that their source-to-source behavior is molecule-dependent rather than fully described by a single common abundance pattern.

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Xuefang Xu, Mingwei He, Qian Gou, Jiao He, Junzhi Wang, Donghui Quan, Di Li, Laurent Pagani, Juan Li, Guoming Zhao, Chunguo Duan, Yang Lu, Luyao Zou. 2026-07-18. Molecule-dependent Abundance Behavior of Oxygen-bearing Complex Organics in High-Mass Star-Forming Regions: A Uniform 50-source Survey. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16734

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