A Green Bank Telescope Survey of Large Galactic HII Regions

Abstract

As part of our ongoing HII Region Discovery Survey (HRDS), we report the Green Bank Telescope detection of 148 new angularly-large Galactic HII regions in radio recombination line (RRL) emission. Our targets are located at a declination greater than -45deg., which corresponds to 266deg. > l > -20deg. at b = 0deg. All sources were selected from the WISE Catalog of Galactic HII Regions, and have infrared angular diameters >260''. The Galactic distribution of these "large" HII regions is similar to that of the previously-known sample of Galactic HII regions. The large HII region RRL line width and peak line intensity distributions are skewed toward lower values compared with that of previous HRDS surveys. We discover 7 sources with extremely narrow RRLs <10 km/s. If half the line width is due to turbulence, these 7 sources have thermal plasma temperatures <1100 K. These temperatures are lower than any measured for Galactic HII regions, and the narrow line components may arise instead from partially ionized zones in the HII region photo-dissociation regions. We discover G039.515+00.511, one of the most luminous HII regions in the Galaxy. We also detect the RRL emission from three HII regions with diameters >100 pc, making them some of the physically largest known HII regions in the Galaxy. This survey completes the HRDS HII region census in the Northern sky, where we have discovered 887 HII regions and more than doubled the previously-known census of Galactic HII regions.

Accepted in ApJS

References in corpus (7)

• The Boston University-Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory Galactic Ring Survey
• The VLA Galactic Plane Survey
• Resolution of the Distance Ambiguity for Galactic HII Regions
• The Chemical Evolution of Helium
• The Molecular Properties of Galactic HII Regions
• Continuum sources from the THOR survey between 1 and 2 GHz
• The Southern HII Region Discovery Survey (SHRDS): Pilot Survey

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