Tracking the Ice Mantle History in the Solar-type Protostars of NGC 1333 IRAS 4

To understand the origin of the diversity observed in exoplanetary systems, it is crucial to characterize the early stages of their formation, represented by solar-type protostars. Likely, the gaseous chemical content of these objects directly depends on the composition of the dust-grain mantles formed before the collapse. Directly retrieving the ice mantle composition is challenging, but it can be done indirectly by observing the major components, such as NH3 and CH3OH at centimeter wavelengths, once they are released into the gas phase during the warm protostellar stage. We observed several CH3OH and NH3 lines toward three Class 0 protostars in NGC 1333 (IRAS 4A1, IRAS 4A2, and IRAS 4B), at high angular resolution (1''; ∼300 au) with the VLA interferometer at 24–26 GHz. Using a non-LTE LVG analysis, we derived a similar NH3/CH3OH abundance ratio in the three protostars (≤0.5, 0.015–0.5, and 0.003–0.3 for IRAS 4A1, 4A2, and 4B, respectively). Hence, we infer they were born from precollapse material with similar physical conditions. Comparing the observed abundance ratios with astrochemical model predictions, we constrained the dust temperature at the time of the mantle formation to be ∼17 K, which coincides with the average temperature of the southern NGC 1333 diffuse cloud. We suggest that a brutal event started the collapse that eventually formed IRAS 4A1, 4A2, and 4B, which, therefore, did not experience the usual prestellar core phase. This event could be the clash of a bubble with NGC 1333 South, which has previously been evoked in the literature.