Other
Scientific paper
Jan 2009
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009aas...21348506s&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #213, #485.06; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.456
Other
Scientific paper
We report the serendipitous discoverey of a class of apparently young, luminous stars in an HST imaging survey, which lie at or near the tips of elongated, highly-structured nebulosities, with cometary- or bow-shock shapes. These objects were selected from the IRAS PSC via their IRAS colors in a search for long-lived preplanetary nebulae (PPNs), but their morphologies clearly show that that these are not PPNs. All objects have point-source 2MASS (JHK) and MSX (A band/8μm) counterparts, implying the presence of local stellar sources which have heated up the dust seen in the HST images (via scattered light) and IRAS data (via thermal emission). A plausible scenario to explain our data is that our program objects are "stellar interlopers" -- stars with substantial winds which have traveled far from their birth-sites, and are currently moving through a dense interstellar cloud at significant speeds. The stellar winds interact with the ISM, creating the observed bow-shock and cometary structures, a mechanism proposed previously to explain cometary HII regions. We describe preliminary results from our
multiwavelength follow-up program to study these stellar interlopers. E.g., near-IR spectroscopy of one source shows the presence of hot, shocked gas both at the location of the interloper star as well as in a trailing "tail" structure -- H2 2μm line emission from the latter is
blue-shifted from the shocked gas close to the star by about 65 km s-1. Single-dish CO J=1-0 observations (with the ARO 12m telescope) of another interloper show a line profile with extended wings (±8; km s-1). Thus,
these molecular-line observations support the presence of outflows in two sources.
Ainsworth Rachael
Claussen Mark
Morris Marita
Sahai Raghvendra
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