The Complex Mid-Infrared Structure at the Heart of IRAS 20126+4104

Abstract

The mid-infrared emission at the center of IRAS 21026+4104 is not that of a simple compact source, as one would expect from an isolated high mass protostellar object. Furthermore the central thermal infrared emission does not appear to be coming directly from a circumstellar disk as has been recently hypothesized from near-infrared observations. The mid-infrared structure is complex, but with the help of multiple wavelength information two plausible scenarios to explain the emission in the region are advanced. The first is that there is a tight cluster of young stellar objects here. The second is that the mid-infrared emission and masers are delineating the walls of the outflow cavities of a massive stellar source located in the center of the near- and mid-infrared dark lane.

To appear in ApJ Letters, version with full resolution figures available at http://www.ctio.noao.edu/~debuizer

References in corpus (2)

• The Remarkable Mid-Infrared Jet of Massive Young Stellar Object G35.20-0.74
• The Masers Towards IRAS 20126+4104

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• The Morphology of M17-UC1 - A Disk Candidate Surrounding a Hypercompact HII Region
• Mid-Infrared Photometry and Spectra of Three High Mass Protostellar Candidates at IRAS 18151-1208 and IRAS 20343+4129
• Masers and star formation
• A Herschel study of the high-mass protostar IRAS20126+4104
• Herschel Hi-GAL imaging of massive young stellar objects
• The infrared environments of masers associated with star formation