| Description |
The impressive first results from the WISH GT key program by van Dishoeck et al. indicate that water emission is bright towards the embedded proto-stars of all masses. These emissions are tracing outflows and warm inner regions of the collapsing envelopes (radiatively heated hot cores) which are unique probes of the cooling of these regions and of the kinematics of the dense warm gas. But WISH is limited by the reduced number of targets, and by the unavoidable biases introduced by the stringent selection of sources. The intermediate to high mass range is critical to challenge protostellar evolution models, and we argue that water emission from a complete sample of proto-stars in this mass range will be an important piece of knowledge for outflows to trace indirectly accretion and for hot cores to follow their time of appearance. Only Cygnus X is nearby and rich enough to provide a large sample of such proto-stars. We propose here to dramatically change the level of significance of WISH results by observing as many as 92 proto-stars covering the (final stellar) mass range of 3 to 20 Msun in the single complex of Cygnus X. |
