English

High-Resolution Observations of the Molecular Clouds Associated with the Huge HII Region CTB 102

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2019-05-08 v1 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

We report the first high-resolution (sub-arcminute) large-scale mapping 12^{12}CO and 13^{13}CO observations of the molecular clouds associated with the giant outer Galaxy HII region CTB~102 (KR 1). These observations were made using a newly commissioned receiver system on the 13.7-m radio telescope at the Taeduk Radio Astronomy Observatory. Our observations show that the molecular clouds have a spatial extent of 60×3560 \times 35 pc and a total mass of 104.8105.010^{4.8} - 10^{5.0} M_\odot. Infrared data from WISE and 2MASS were used to identify and classify the YSO population associated with ongoing star formation activity within the molecular clouds. We directly detect 18 class I/class II YSOs and six transition disk objects. Moving away from the HII region, there is an age/class gradient consistent with sequential star formation. The infrared and molecular-line data were combined to estimate the star formation efficiency (SFE) of the entire cloud as well as the SFE for various sub-regions of the cloud. We find that the overall SFE is between 510\sim5 - 10%, consistent with previous observations of giant molecular clouds. One of the sub-regions, region 1a, is a clear outlier, with a SFE of 17 - 35% on a 5 pc spatial scale. This high SFE is more typical for much smaller (sub-pc scale) star-forming cores, and we think region 1a is likely an embedded massive protocluster.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1904.00529,
  title  = {High-Resolution Observations of the Molecular Clouds Associated with the Huge HII Region CTB 102},
  author = {Brandon Marshall and Sung-ju Kang and C. R. Kerton and Youngsik Kim and Minho Choi and Miju Kang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.00529},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

16 pages, 8 figures, 5 tables