A wind-blown bubble in the Central Molecular Zone cloud G0.253+0.016

Jonathan D. Henshaw*, Mark R. Krumholz, Natalie O. Butterfield, Jonathan Mackey, Adam Ginsburg, Thomas J. Haworth, Francisco Nogueras-Lara, Ashley T. Barnes, Steven N. Longmore, John Bally, J. M.Diederik Kruijssen, Elisabeth A.C. Mills, Henrik Beuther, Daniel L. Walker, Cara Battersby, Alyssa Bulatek, Thomas Henning, Juergen Ott, Juan D. Soler

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    10 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    G0.253+0.016, commonly referred to as 'the Brick' and located within the Central Molecular Zone, is one of the densest (≈103-4 cm-3) molecular clouds in the Galaxy to lack signatures of widespread star formation. We set out to constrain the origins of an arc-shaped molecular line emission feature located within the cloud. We determine that the arc, centred on, has a radius of 1.3 pc and kinematics indicative of the presence of a shell expanding at. Extended radio continuum emission fills the arc cavity and recombination line emission peaks at a similar velocity to the arc, implying that the molecular gas and ionized gas are physically related. The inferred Lyman continuum photon rate is NLyC = 1046.0-1047.9 photons s-1, consistent with a star of spectral type B1-O8.5, corresponding to a mass of ≈12-20 M. We explore two scenarios for the origin of the arc: (i) a partial shell swept up by the wind of an interloper high-mass star and (ii) a partial shell swept up by stellar feedback resulting from in situ star formation. We favour the latter scenario, finding reasonable (factor of a few) agreement between its morphology, dynamics, and energetics and those predicted for an expanding bubble driven by the wind from a high-mass star. The immediate implication is that G0.253+0.016 may not be as quiescent as is commonly accepted. We speculate that the cloud may have produced a 103 M star cluster 0.4 Myr ago, and demonstrate that the high-extinction and stellar crowding observed towards G0.253+0.016 may help to obscure such a star cluster from detection.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)4758-4774
    Number of pages17
    JournalMonthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
    Volume509
    Issue number4
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 1 Feb 2022

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