10 MK Gas in M17 and the Rosette Nebula: X-Ray Flows in Galactic H II Regions

By L. Townsley, Eric D. Feigelson, T. Montmerle, Patrick S. Broos, Y. Chu, G. Garmire. 2003

183 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present the first high spatial resolution X-ray images of two high-mass star forming regions, the Omega Nebula (M17) and the Rosette Nebula (NGC 2237-2246), obtained with the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer instrument. The massive clusters powering these H II regions are resolved at the arcsecond level into more than 900 (M17) and 300 (Rosette) stellar sources similar to those seen in closer young stellar clusters. However, we also detect soft diffuse X-ray emission on parsec scales that is spatially and spectrally distinct from the point-source population. The diffuse emission has luminosity LX ≃ 3.4 × 1033 ergs s-1 in M17 with plasma energy components at kT ≃ 0.13 and ≃0.6 keV (1.5 and 7 MK), while in Rosette it has LX ≃ 6 × 1032 ergs s-1 with plasma energy components at kT ≃ 0.06 and ≃0.8 keV (0.7 and 9 MK). This extended emission most likely arises from the fast O star winds thermalized either by wind-wind collisions or by a termination shock against the surrounding media. We establish that only a small portion of the wind energy and mass appears in the observed diffuse X-ray plasma; in these blister H II regions, we suspect that most of it flows without cooling into the low-density interstellar medium. These data provide compelling observational evidence that strong wind shocks are present in H II regions.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ad05fd1792da406321a1d2bba05496d05bd15a32

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Citations in the corpus

Feedback from winds and supernovae in massive stellar clusters – I. Hydrodynamics (2012, background): “Firstly, the diffuse X-ray emission in M17 and the Rosette nebula reveals that only a small proportion of the cluster wind energy is radiated in the X-ray, and Townsley et al. (2003) conclude that most of the hot gas must flow without cooling into the wider ISM.”
Radiative feedback and the low efficiency of galaxy formation in low-mass haloes at high redshift (2013, background): “This scale is typical of HII regions around low-mass, star clusters (Hillenbrand & Hartmann 1998; Townsley et al. 2003; Feigelson et al. 2005; Wang et al. 2008; Güdel et al. 2008).”
Chandra Orion Ultradeep Project: Observations and Source Lists (2004, background): “We outline in this section the first steps of data selection; see Appendix B of Townsley et al. (2003) for more details on many of these steps.”
THE ROLE OF STELLAR FEEDBACK IN THE FORMATION OF GALAXIES (2007, background): “Nevertheless, temperatures of diffuse gas as high as 106–107 K have been observed around star-forming regions such as the Rosette nebulae (Townsley et al. 2003; Wang et al. 2008), M17 (Townsley et al. 2003), and the Orion nebula (Feigelson et al. 2005; Guedel et al. 2008).”
Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon processing in a hot gas (2009, background): “The observed X-ray luminosity is 4× 1033 erg s−1 and the X-ray temperature is 7× 106 K (Townsley et al. 2003).”
A CATALOG OF X-RAY POINT SOURCES FROM TWO MEGASECONDS OF CHANDRA OBSERVATIONS OF THE GALACTIC CENTER (2008, methodology): “We computed aperture photometry for each source using the ACIS Extract package, versions 3.96, 3.101, and 3.128 (Broos et al. 2002; Townsley et al. 2003; Getman et al. 2005), along with some custom code.”
Diffuse X-Ray Emission in a Deep Chandra Image of the Galactic Center (2004, methodology): “We reduced the data from each observation using the methods described in detail in Muno et al. (2003a) and Townsley et al. (2003).”
A gallery of bubbles. The nature of the bubbles observed by Spitzer and what ATLASGAL tells us about the surrounding neutral material (2010, methodology): “The X-ray emission of this gas has been observed for M17 and the Rosette Nebula (Townsley et al. 2003), and the Orion Nebula (Güdel et al. 2008).”
INNOVATIONS IN THE ANALYSIS OF CHANDRA-ACIS OBSERVATIONS (2010, methodology): “M 17 (Townsley et al. 2003; Broos et al. 2007), the Orion Nebula (Getman et al. 2005), L 1448 (Tsujimoto et al. 2005), Cep B (Getman et al. 2006), Wd 1 (Muno et al. 2006), 30 Dor (Townsley et al. 2006a, 2006b), W 49A (Tsujimoto et al. 2006), NGC 6357 (Wang et al. 2007), RCW 49 (Tsujimoto et al.…”
Superbubbles and energetic particles in the Galaxy. I. Collective effects of particle acceleration (2004, background): “In the 30 Doradus complex in the LMC, Walborn et al. (1999) find compact subgroups of massive stars containing typically ten OB stars within few pc, a trend which is confirmed by recent Chandra arcsecond observations (Townsley et al. 2003).”