Discovery of a dense bipolar outflow from a new class 0 protostar in NGC 2068/LBS 17

We report the discovery of high-velocity dense gas from a bipolar outflow source near NGC 2068 in the L1630 giant molecular cloud. CO and HCO+ J = 3 --> 2 line wings have a bipolar distribution in the vicinity of LBS 17-H with the flow orientated roughly east-west and perpendicular to the elongation of the submillimetre dust continuum emission. The flow is compact (total extent similar to 0.2 pc) and contains of the order of 0.1 M. of swept-up gas. The high-velocity HCO+ emission is distributed over a somewhat smaller area < 0.1 pc in extent. A map of (CO)-O-18 J = 2 --> 1 emission traces the LBS 17 core and follows the ambient HCO+ emission reasonably well, with the exception of the direction towards LBS 17-H where there is a significant anticorrelation between the (CO)-O-18 and HCO+. A comparison of beam-matched (CO)-O-18 and dust-derived H-2 column densities suggests that CO is depleted by up to a factor of similar to 50 at this position if the temperature is as low as 9 K, although the difference is substantially reduced if the temperature is as high as 20 K. Chemical models of collapsing clouds can account for this discrepancy in terms of different rates of depletion on to dust grains for CO and HCO+. LBS 17-H has a previously known water maser coincident with it but there are no known near-infrared, IRAS or radio continuum sources associated with this object, leading to the conclusion that it is probably very young. A greybody fit to the continuum data gives a luminosity of only 1.7 L. and a submillimetre-to-bolometric luminosity ratio of 0.1, comfortably satisfying the criteria for classification as a class 0 protostar candidate.