Vortragsdetails

Mittwoch, 26. Januar 2011 - 15:15

Pamela Klaassen (ESO):

"Gas Dynamics in Massive Star Forming Regions"

Zusammenfassung. Massive stars play a large role in the evolution of galaxies; from injecting turbulence into the ISM, to enriching their environments with heavy elements. Yet, it is still unclear how they form. Because of their distance, and the fact that they are very embedded, we are often limited to studying the surroundings of young massive stars in order to better understand their formation. To this end, I observed a number of high mass star forming regions at high angular resolution (~1'') through a combination of observations obtained at the SMA and JCMT. From these observations, I find that the warm molecular gas surrounding each HII region is undergoing bulk rotation, and that infall, when detected, is occurring preferentially along the rotation direction. Perpendicular to this, I find evidence for large scale outflows being powered by a source within the HII region itself. I present a quantitative kinematic analysis of these bulk motions and compare them with the kinematic properties of the ionized gas in the same regions to provide a coherent picture of the total gas dynamics in massive star forming regions