Observations and Chemical Modeling of the Isotopologues of Formaldehyde and the Cations of Formyl and Protonated Formaldehyde in the Hot Molecular Core G331.512–0.103 Mendoza, Edgar Carvajal Zaera, Miguel Merello, Manuel Bronfman, Leonardo Boechat-Roberty, Heloisa María Interstellar molecules Astrochemistry Molecular data Astronomy data analysis Spectral line identification Star forming regions Molecular reactions We sincerely acknowledge the anonymous reviewer for the constructive and careful revision of the manuscript. E.M. acknowledges support under the grant "María Zambrano" from the UHU funded by the Spanish Ministry of Universities and the "European Union NextGenerationEU." This project has also received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 872081, grant PID2019-104002GB-C21 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, and, as appropriate, by "ERDF A way of making Europe," the "European Union," or the "European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR." This work is also supported by the Consejería de Transformación Económica, Industria, Conocimiento y Universidades, Junta de Andalucía and European Regional Development Fund (ERDF 2014-2020) PY2000764. L.B. gratefully acknowledges support by ANID BASAL projects AFB17002 and ACE210002. In the interstellar cold gas, the chemistry of formaldehyde (H2CO) can be essential to explain the formation of complex organic molecules. On this matter, the massive and energetic protostellar object G331 is still unexplored; hence, we carried out a comprehensive study of the isotopologues of H2CO, the formyl cation (HCO+), and protonated formaldehyde (H2COH+) through the APEX observations in a spectral window of similar to 159-356 GHz. We employed observational and theoretical methods to derive the physical properties of the molecular gas combining LTE and non-LTE analyses. Formaldehyde was characterized via 35 lines of H2CO, H213 2C(18)O. The formyl cation was detected via eight lines of HCO+, (HCO+)-C-13, (HCO+)-O-18, and (HCO+)-O-17. Deuterium was clearly detected via HDCO, whereas DCO+ remained undetected. The H2COH+ was detected through three clean lines. According to the radiative analysis, formaldehyde appears to be embedded in a bulk gas with a wide range of temperatures (T`similar to 20-90 K), while HCO+ and H2COH+ are primarily associated with colder gas (T -> 30 K). The reaction H2CO+HCO+-> H2COH+ + CO is crucial for the balance of the three species. We used the Nautilus gas-grain code to predict the evolution of their molecular abundances relative to H-2; their values at timescales of similar to 10(3) yr matched the observations in G331: [H2CO] = (0.2-2) x 10(-8), [HCO+] = (0.5-4) x 10(-9), and [H2COH+] = (0.2-2) x 10(-10). Based on the molecular evolution of H2CO, HCO+, and H2COH+, we hypothesized about the young lifetime of G331, which is consistent with the active gas-grain chemistry of massive protostellar objects. 2023-09-25T06:37:02Z 2023-09-25T06:37:02Z 2023-08-03 journal article Edgar Mendoza et al. 2023. Observations and Chemical Modeling of the Isotopologues of Formaldehyde and the Cations of Formyl and Protonated Formaldehyde in the Hot Molecular Core G331.512–0.103. ApJ 953 77. [DOI 10.3847/1538-4357/ace048] https://hdl.handle.net/10481/84597 10.3847/1538-4357/ace048 eng info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020/872081 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ open access Atribución 4.0 Internacional IOP