Molecular Hydrogen Outflow in Infrared Dark Cloud Core MSXDC G53.11+00.05

  • Kim, Hyun-Jeong (Seoul National University) ;
  • Koo, Bon-Chul (Seoul National University) ;
  • Pyo, Tae-Soo (Subaru Telescope, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan) ;
  • Davis, Christopher J. (National Science Foundation)
  • Published : 2015.10.15

Abstract

Outflows and jets from young stellar objects (YSOs) are prominent observational phenomena in star formation process. Indicating currently ongoing star formation and directly tracing mass accretion, they provide clues about the accretion processes and accretion history of YSOs. While outflows of low-mass YSOs are commonly observed and well studied, such studies for high-mass YSOs have been so far rather limited owing to their large distances and high visual extinction. Recently, we have found a number of molecular hydrogen (H2 1-0 S(1) at 2.12 micron) outflows in the long, filamentary infrared dark cloud (IRDC) G53.2 located at 1.7 kpc from UWISH2, the unbiased, narrow-band imaging survey centered at 2.12 micron using WFCAM/UKIRT. In IRDC G53.2 which is an active star-forming region with ~300 YSOs, H2 outflows are ubiquitously distributed around YSOs along dark filaments. In this study, we present the most prominent H2 outflow among them identified in one of the IRDC cores MSXDC G53.11+00.05. The outflow shows a remarkable bipolar morphology and has complex structures with several flows and knots. The outflow size of ~1 pc and H2 luminosity about ~1.2 Lsol as well as spectral energy distributions of the Class I YSOs at the center suggest that the outflow is likely associated with a high-mass YSO. We report the physical properties of H2 outflow and characteristics of central YSOs that show variability between several years using the H2 and [Fe II] images obtained from UWISH2, UWIFE and Subaru/IRCS+AO188 observations. Based on the results, we discuss the possible origin of the outflow and accretion processes in terms of massive star formation occurring in IRDC core.

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