The Origin of Ionized Filaments Within the Orion-Eridanus Superbubble

Abstract

The Orion-Eridanus superbubble, formed by the nearby Orion high mass star-forming region, contains multiple bright H$\alpha$ filaments on the Eridanus side of the superbubble. We examine the implications of the H$\alpha$ brightnesses and sizes of these filaments, the Eridanus filaments. We find that either the filaments must be highly elongated along the line of sight or they cannot be equilibrium structures illuminated solely by the Orion star-forming region. The Eridanus filaments may, instead, have formed when the Orion-Eridanus superbubble encountered and compressed a pre-existing, ionized gas cloud, such that the filaments are now out of equilibrium and slowly recombining.

11 pages, 2 figures, accepted by MNRAS, minor grammatical changes

References in corpus (4)

• The distance to the Orion Nebula
• A Parallactic Distance of 389 +24/-21 parsecs to the Orion Nebula Cluster from Very Long Baseline Array Observations
• Three-Dimensional Simulations of Magnetized Superbubbles: New Insights into the Importance of MHD Effects on Observed Quantities
• Molecular Hydrogen Fluorescence in the Eridanus Superbubble

Cited by in corpus (4)

• 3D Dust Mapping Reveals that Orion Forms Part of a Large Ring of Dust
• Kompaneets Model Fitting of the Orion-Eridanus Superbubble II: Thinking Outside of Barnard's Loop
• Kompaneets Model Fitting of the Orion-Eridanus Superbubble
• Ionized filaments and ongoing physical processes in massive star-forming sites around l = 345.5 degree