Peculiar Dust Emission within the Orion Molecular Cloud

Parisa Nozari, Sarah Sadavoy, Edwige Chapillon, Brian Mason, Rachel Friesen, Ian Lowe, Thomas Stanke, James Di Francesco, Thomas Henning, Qizhou Zhang, Amelia Stutz

Published 2024-11-19Version 1

It is widely assumed that dust opacities in molecular clouds follow a power-law profile with an index, $\beta$. Recent studies of the Orion Molecular Cloud (OMC) 2/3 complex, however, show a flattening in the spectral energy distribution (SED) at $ \lambda > 2$ mm implying non-constant indices on scales $\gtrsim$ 0.08 pc. The origin of this flattening is not yet known but it may be due to the intrinsic properties of the dust grains or contamination from other sources of emission. We investigate the SED slopes in OMC 2/3 further using observations of six protostellar cores with NOEMA from 2.9 mm to 3.6 mm and ALMA-ACA in Band 4 (1.9 -- 2.1 mm) and Band 5 (1.6 -- 1.8 mm) on core and envelope scales of $\sim 0.02 - 0.08$ pc. We confirm flattened opacity indices between 2.9 mm and 3.6 mm for the six cores with $\beta \approx -0.16 - 1.45$, which are notably lower than the $\beta$ values of $> 1.3$ measured for these sources on $0.08$ pc scales from single-dish data. Four sources have consistent SED slopes between the ALMA data and the NOEMA data. We propose that these sources may have a significant fraction of emission coming from large dust grains in embedded disks, which biases the emission more at longer wavelengths. Two sources, however, had inconsistent slopes between the ALMA and NOEMA data, indicating different origins of emission. These results highlight how care is needed when combining multi-scale observations or extrapolating single-band observations to other wavelengths.