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Description
The formation of massive stars and their arrival on the zero-age main-sequence occurs hidden behind dense clouds of gas and dust. In the giant HII region NGC 3603, the radiation of a young cluster of OB stars has dispersed dust and gas in its vicinity. At a projected distance of 2.5pc from the cluster, a bright mid-infrared (mid-IR) source (IRS 9A) was identified as a massive young stellar object (MYSO), located on the side of a molecular clump (MM2) of gas facing the cluster. We investigated the physical conditions in MM2, based on APEX sub-mm observations using the SABOCA and SHFI instruments, and archival ATCA 3mm continuum and CS spectral line data. We resolved MM2 into several compact cores, one of them closely associated with IRS 9A. These are likely to be infrared dark clouds because they do not show the typical hot-core emission lines and are mostly opaque against the mid-IR background. The compact cores have masses of up to several hundred times the solar mass and gas temperatures of about 50K, without evidence of internal ionizing sources. We speculate that IRS 9A is younger than the cluster stars, but is in an evolutionary state after the compact cores.
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