The Physical and Chemical Evolution of Starless and Prestellar Cores

Starless and prestellar core are the earliest stage of star and planet formation where the initial physical and chemical conditions of the future protoplanetary disk are set. In this talk, I shall synthesize a series of projects to understand starless and prestellar core evolution by studying the complete core population of the B10 region of the Taurus Molecular Cloud, a pristine environment only containing starless and prestellar cores embedded within filamentary structure with minimal feedback from protostars. Using 3D radiative transfer modeling of (sub)millimeter continuum emission, we have constructed physical models of the cores. Mapping observations of dense gas tracers (i.e. pNH3), analyzed with a new multi-velocity component Bayesian decomposition, probe the viral stability and kinematics of the filaments and cores. We characterize the chemical evolution of the cores with surveys of deuteration in dense gas tracers (DNC, N2D+, NH2D) and organic molecules (CH2DOH, HDCO, pD2CO) along with gas depletion in C18O. By combing the information from these different surveys, we constrain the physical and chemical evolution, including evidence for differential evolution rates, of this population of starless and prestellar cores and compare our results with MHD models of core evolution.