We present a comprehensive physical and chemical study of the fragmentation
and star formation activity towards the massive clump AGAL G338.9188+0.5494
harbouring the extended green object EGO 338.92+0.55(b). The presence of an EGO
embedded in a massive clump, suggests, at clump scale, that high-mass star
formation is occurring. The main goal of this work is to find evidence of such
high-mass star formation, but at core scale. Using mm observations of continuum
and lines obtained from the ALMA database at Bands 6 and 7, we study the
substructure of the massive clump. The angular resolution of the data is about
0.5'', which allow us to resolve structures of about 0.01pc (∼ 2000 au) at
the distance of 4.4 kpc. The continuum emission at 340 GHz reveals that the
molecular clump is fragmented in five cores, labeled from C1 to C5. The
12CO J=3--2 emission shows the presence of molecular outflows related to
three of them. The analysis of the CH3​CN and CH3​CCH emissions suggests
temperatures of about 340 and 72~K, respectively, for C1, showing that the
methyl cyanide would trace a gas layer closer to the protostar than the methyl
acetylene. The obtained mass of core C1 ranges from 3 to 10 M⊙​. We
found that the discovered molecular outflow arising from core C1 should be the
main responsible for the 4.5 μm extended emission. The average mass and
energy of such a molecular outflow is about 0.5 M⊙​~and 1046~erg,
respectively, which suggest that 10 M⊙​ is the most likely mass value
for core C1. Additionally we found that the region is chemically very rich with
several complex molecular species. Particularly, from the analysis of the CN
emission we found strong evidence that such a radical is indirectly tracing the
molecular outflows, more precisely the border of the cavity walls carved out by
such outflows.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&A (July 5, 2023