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Description
The characterization of dust properties in the interstellar medium (ISM) is key for understanding the physics and chemistry of star formation. Mass estimates are crucial to determine gravitational collapse conditions for the birth of new stellar objects in molecular clouds. However, most of these estimates rely on dust models that need further observational constraints to capture the relevant parameters variations depending on the local environment: from clouds to prestellar and protostellar cores. We present results of a new study of dust emissivity changes based on millimeter (mm) continuum data obtained with the NIKA camera at the IRAM-30m telescope. Observing dust emission at 1.15mm and 2mm allows us to constrain the dust emissivity index, {beta}, in the Rayleigh-Jeans tail of the dust spectral energy distribution (SED) far from its peak emission, where the contribution of other parameters (i.e. dust temperature) is more important. Focusing on the Taurus molecular cloud, one of the most famous low-mass star-forming regions in the Gould Belt, we analyze the emission properties of several distinct objects in the B213 filament. This sub-parsec size region is of particular interest since it is characterized by the presence of a collection of evolutionary stages of early star formation: three prestellar cores, two Class-0/I protostellar cores and one Class-II object. We are therefore able to compare dust properties among a sequence of sources that likely derive from the same parent filament. By means of the ratio of the two NIKA channel-maps, we show that in the Rayleigh-Jeans approximation, {beta}_RJ_ varies among the objects: it decreases from prestellar cores ({beta}_RJ_~2) to protostellar cores ({beta}_RJ_~1) and the Class-II object ({beta}_RJ_~0). For one prestellar and two protostellar cores, we produce a robust study using available Herschel data to constrain the dust temperature of the sources. By using the Abel transform inversion technique we get accurate radial temperature profiles that allow us to obtain radial {beta} profiles. We find systematic spatial variations of {beta} in the protostellar cores that is not observed in the prestellar core. While in the former case {beta} decreases toward the center (with {beta} varying between 1 and 2), in the latter it remains constant ({beta}=2.4+/-0.3). Moreover, the dust emissivity index appears anticorrelated with the dust temperature. We discuss the implication of these results in terms of dust grain evolution between pre- and protostellar cores.
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