Exploring the formation pathways of formamide. Near young O-type stars

Context. As a building block for amino acids, formamide (NH₂CHO) is an important molecule in astrobiology and astrochemistry, but its formation path in the interstellar medium is not understood well.
Aims: We aim to find empirical evidence to support the chemical relationships of formamide to HNCO and H₂CO.
Methods: We examine high angular resolution (~0.2″) Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array maps of six sources in three high-mass star-forming regions and compare the spatial extent, integrated emission peak position, and velocity structure of HNCO and H₂CO line emission with that of NH₂CHO by using moment maps. Through spectral modeling, we compare the abundances of these three species.
Results: In these sources, the emission peak separation and velocity dispersion of formamide emission is most often similar to HNCO emission, while the velocity structure is generally just as similar to H₂CO and HNCO (within errors). From the spectral modeling, we see that the abundances between all three of our focus species are correlated, and the relationship between NH₂CHO and HNCO reproduces the previously demonstrated abundance relationship.
Conclusions: In this first interferometric study, which compares two potential parent species to NH₂CHO, we find that all moment maps for HNCO are more similar to NH₂CHO than H₂CO in one of our six sources (G24 A1). For the other five sources, the relationship between NH₂CHO, HNCO, and H₂CO is unclear as the different moment maps for each source are not consistently more similar to one species as opposed to the other.

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