ISU: First High-Resolution Look at Huge Star-Forming Region

[bystander]

First High-Resolution Look at Huge Star-Forming Region of Milky Way
Iowa State University | 2019 Apr 15

This image from a radio telescope shows a huge star-forming region of the outer Milky Way galaxy. The ovals identify the main subdivisions of the region's molecular cloud, including the smaller 1a, which is very efficient at producing stars. (Credit: Charles Kerton)

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Astronomers from the United States and South Korea have made the first high-resolution, radio telescope observations of the molecular clouds within a massive star-forming region of the outer Milky Way.

“This region is behind a nearby cloud of dust and gas,” said Charles Kerton ... “The cloud blocks the light and so we have to use infrared or radio observations to study it.”

The Milky Way region is called CTB 102. It’s about 14,000 light years from Earth. It’s classified as an HII region, meaning it contains clouds of ionized – charged – hydrogen atoms. And, because of its distance from Earth and the dust and gas in between, it has been difficult to study. ...

Kerton said the astronomers used a newly commissioned radio telescope at the Taeduk Radio Astronomy Observatory in South Korea to take high resolution, carbon monoxide observations of the galactic region’s molecular clouds.

“That tells us the mass and structure of the material in the interstellar medium there,” Kerton said.

The astronomers also compared their radio observations with existing infrared data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer and the Two Micron All Sky Survey. The infrared data allowed them to classify young stars forming within the region’s molecular clouds. ...

High-Resolution Observations of the Molecular Clouds
Associated with the Huge HII Region CTB 102 ~ Brandon Marshall et al

• arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1904.00529 > 01 Apr 2019