2015A&A...577A..69P

The study of prestellar cores is essential to understanding the initial stages of star formation. With Herschel more cold clumps have been detected than ever before. For this study we have selected 21 cold clumps from 20 Herschel fields observed as a follow-up on original Planck detections. We have observed these clumps in ¹³CO (1-0), C¹⁸O (1-0), and N₂H⁺ (1-0) lines. Our aim is to find out if these cold clumps are prestellar. We have examined to what extent independent analysis of the dust and the molecular lines lead to similar conclusions about the masses of these objects. We calculate the clump masses and densities from the dust continuum and molecular line observations and compare these to each other and to the virial and Bonnor-Ebert masses calculated for each clump. Finally we examine two of the fields with radiative transfer models to estimate CO abundances. When excitation temperatures could be estimated, the column densities derived from molecular line observations were comparable to those from dust continuum data. The median column density estimates are 4.2x10²¹cm^–2 and 5.5x10²¹cm^–2 for the line and dust emission data, respectively. The calculated abundances, column densities, volume densities, and masses all have large uncertainties and one must be careful when drawing conclusions. Abundance of ¹³CO was found in modeling the two clumps in the field G131.65+9.75 to be close to the usual value of 10^–6. The abundance ratio of ¹³CO and C¹⁸O was ∼10. Molecular abundances could only be estimated with modeling, relying on dust column density data. The results indicate that most cold clumps, even those with dust color temperatures close to 11K, are not necessarily prestellar.