The Post-shock Chemical Lifetimes of Outflow Tracers and a Possible New Mechanism to Produce Water Ice Mantles

We have used a coupled time-dependent chemical and dynamical model to investigate the lifetime of the chemical legacy left in the wake of C-type shocks. We concentrate this study on the chemistry of H2O and O2, two molecules which are predicted to have abundances that are significantly affected in shock-heated gas. Two models are presented: (1) a three-stage model of pre-shock, shocked, and post-shock gas; and (2) a Monte-Carlo cloud simulation where we explore the effects of stochastic shock activity on molecular gas over a cloud lifetime. For both models we separately examine the pure gas-phase chemistry as well as the chemistry including the interactions of molecules with grain surfaces. In agreement with previous studies, we find that shock velocities in excess of 10 km s are required to convert all of the oxygen not locked in CO into H2O before the gas has an opportunity to cool. For pure gas-phase models the lifetime of the high water abundances, or “H2O legacy”, in the post-shock gas is ∼ 4 − 7 × 10 years, independent of the gas density. A density dependence for the lifetime of H2O is found in gas-grain models as the water molecules deplete onto grains at the depletion timescale. Through the Monte Carlo cloud simulation we demonstrate that the time-average abundance of H2O – the weighted average of the amount of time gas spends in preshock, shock, and post-shock stages – is a sensitive function of the frequency of shocks. Thus we predict that the abundance of H2O, and to a lesser extent O2, can be used to trace the history of shock activity in molecular gas. We use previous large-scale surveys of molecular outflows to constrain the frequency of 10 km s shocks in regions with varying star-formation properties and discuss the observations required to test these results. We discuss the post-shock lifetimes for other possible outflow tracers (e.g. SiO, CH3OH) and show that the differences between the lifetimes for various tracers can produce potentially observable chemical variations between younger and older outflows. For gas-grain models we find that the abundance of water-ice on grain surfaces can be quite large and is comparable to that observed in molecular clouds. This offers a possible alternative method to create water mantles without resorting to