A&A 375, 539-552 (2001)
DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361:20010654
F. Comerón1 - J. Torra2
1 - European Southern Observatory, Karl-Schwarzschild-Str. 2,
85748 Garching bei München, Germany
2 -
Departament d'Astronomia i Meteorologia, Universitat de
Barcelona, Av. Diagonal 647, 08028 Barcelona, Spain
Received 24 January 2001 / Accepted 12 April 2001
Abstract
We present a near-infrared imaging survey of compact HII
regions in the direction of the Cygnus X complex, for which no
previous observations at those wavelengths have been published so
far. The targets have been selected from a catalog of sources in
that region having a thermal spectral energy distribution between
408 and 4800 MHz (Wendker et al. 1991), and an inferred angular size smaller than 5 arcmin across.
We present images in the JHK filters, color-magnitude, and
color-color diagrams for each region. We also suggest and apply a
method for estimating the distance by comparing the dereddened
H-band flux from all the stars in the area of the HII region
and the radio-continuum flux. Many of the regions
imaged are clearly associated with stellar aggregates with
different degrees of concentration, whose components show varying
amounts of extinction. Some objects are often found in the region
of the (J-H), (H-K) diagram indicating excess emission of
circumstellar nature. A detailed discussion on each object is
provided in the context of existing published observations at
different wavelengths, in particular regarding the existence of
ultracompact components. A number of ultracompact HII regions are
found to have clearly visible unresolved or nearly unresolved
K-band counterparts characterized by very red H-K colors,
suggesting that the extinction may be low enough in their
direction so as to allow the direct observation of the star
ionizing the ultracompact component.
Key words: stars: early-type - HII regions - Cygnus X
The Cygnus X complex of molecular clouds (Bolton & Westford 1950; Piddington & Minnett 1952) stands out as one of the richest aggregates of star forming regions in our galactic neighborhood. It appears projected in an area of the sky containing many other structures related to massive star formation and violent processes in the interstellar medium (Bochkarev & Sitnik 1985). The inventory includes the OB associations of the Cygnus arm (including the massive association Cygnus OB2; e.g. Knödlseder 2000 and references therein), the X-ray emitting Cygnus Superbubble, and several other star forming regions revealed by IRAS (Odenwald & Schwartz 1993). A vast amount of observations of Cygnus X, mostly at radio, far, and mid-infrared wavelengths (e.g. Dobashi et al. 1996), have produced comprehensive pictures at various resolution scales of the different individual components of the complex, as well as of its large scale structure. Numerous individual HII regions, first noted by Downes & Rinehart (1968), as well as young supernova remnants, have been revealed in these studies.
The many individual compact HII regions of Cygnus X have important potential for the study of the three-dimensional structure of the complex and its present star-forming activity. They also make up an appropriate sample showing the variety of morphologies that can arise from the interaction of small- and medium-sized aggregates of massive stars with the interstellar medium, while the fact that many of them may be physically related to a single, large complex allows one to study them at a similar spatial resolution using a single instrumental setup. Besides providing flux-limited complete samples of compact HII regions in Cygnus X, observations published to date at radio wavelengths have yielded insights on the morphological and kinematical properties of the ionized gas, while IRAS observations in the mid-infrared (Odenwald 1989; Odenwald & Schwartz 1993) have allowed the determination of some bulk properties of their embedded populations. Unfortunately, detailed studies of their stellar components have been hampered so far by the heavy obscuration towards most of these regions, rendering both the ionized gas and the stars ionizing it unobservable at visible wavelengths. Observations in the near infrared, being much less affected by intervening extinction, can however overcome this limitation, providing detailed information on the properties of the stellar population and the distribution and dynamics of the interstellar medium.
As a first step in the study of their stellar components and the detailed morphology of their associated gas, we present in this paper a broad-band JHK imaging survey of compact HII regions in Cygnus X. The power of near-infrared imaging in a particular example, also located in Cygnus X, is demonstrated by the study of Comerón & Torra (1999) of the DR 18 HII region. The more limited observational material available in the present case, in particular the unavailability of narrow-band imaging centered on selected lines in the K band, does not allow us to go to the level of detail reached in our previous study of DR 18. However, it is still useful in revealing the morphology of the different HII regions and the diverse degrees of richness, concentration, and obscuration of the stellar aggregates that power them.
Our sample selection criteria, observations, and data reduction are described in Sect. 2. Section 3 presents the results and introduces our method for distance estimates. We also supply a detailed object-by-object discussion, placing each one in the context defined by previous observational work. Our conclusions are summarized in Sect. 4.
Our target list was built using the catalog of compact radio
sources in Cygnus X of Wendker et al. (1991). Based on
the spectral index measured between 408 and 4800 MHz, that paper
classifies the sources as thermal (HII regions) and non-thermal
(supernova remnants). Only the first class was considered for the
present study. Furthermore, we retained only those sources whose
listed size was compact enough to be completely covered in the
field of view of the detector used (see Sect. 2.1), thus
rejecting HII regions whose listed size exceeded 5.
Some of the
sources meeting our two selection criteria have been intensively
studied by other authors, also in the near-infrared, and
therefore we excluded them from our target list as well. These
sources are S106, DR21, and DR18. The targets in our final sample
are individually discussed in Sect. 3.3, and their coordinates
and main features are given in Table 1 at the end of this paper.
For the sake of homogeneity we use the object denominations of
Wendker et al. (1991), although some sources, noted
in Table 1, also have more commonly used DR (Downes & Rinehart
1968) denominations.
The observations presented in this paper were carried out on the
nights of 6 and 7 August 1998 using CAIN, the near-infrared array
camera at the 1.5 m Carlos Sánchez Telescope in the Observatorio
del Teide (Canary Islands, Spain). This camera has a Rockwell
array with a pixel scale of 1
00 per pixel at the Kband (the scale depends slightly on the filter used), yielding a
field of view of
per frame. Each observation of a
region in a given filter consisted of 9 sequences of 5 individual
frames each, obtained on a dither grid of
points in
a square pattern of
.
The 5 individual frames at
each position, each of 6 s of exposure time, were saved
individually. This was preferred to stacking of the 5 exposures
in a single frame, due to the appreciable drift in the positioning
of the telescope during the 30 s spent at each position:
blind tracking was used, as the frequency of offsets to complete
the drift pattern would otherwise have imposed a large overhead
in the execution time if using the autoguider. Shift-and-add at
the reduction stage allowed us to compensate for the drift, as
well as to remove cosmic rays and detector bad pixels in the
stacked images. Sky images were obtained separately, as the
crowdedness of our target fields and the abundance of extended
nebulosity did not allow us to construct acceptable sky
background images by median-filtering of the jittered exposures
on the target fields. The observing strategy employed was as
follows: first, all the HII regions were imaged in the Kfilter, in a sequence consisting of one observation of one field,
a nearby sky region, another field, the sky region again, and so
on until observing all the fields in our list. Then, the sequence
was repeated in the H filter, and finally in the J filter.
Photometric calibration was obtained from short exposures of each
field in each filter on both nights when the Cygnus X region was
near the meridian, alternating the exposures of the fields with
observations of the infrared standard star FS 29 (Casali &
Hawarden 1998).
The observations were reduced using standard infrared imaging data reduction procedures, implemented by means of dedicated IRAF scripts. The small variations in the scale of the images obtained through the different filters were corrected for by enlarging the images in the J and H filter so as to match the scale of the K image, using a flux-conserving pixel interpolation schema. Point sources were detected by adding the frames in J, H, and K, and running DAOPHOT (Stetson 1987) on the resulting image. The photometry was obtained as follows: in a first step, aperture photometry with a large aperture was performed on the images of the standard star and of suitable bright and isolated stars in the short exposures of the fields imaged at the same time as the standard. This allowed us to set up a network of bright secondary standards in each field and filter. Then, aperture photometry with a small aperture (3 pixels in radius), adequate for our rather crowded fields, was performed on the deeper images. Finally, magnitudes for all the stars detected in each field were determined taking those of the secondary standards as a reference. We also experimented with results obtained by performing point-spread function (PSF) photometry on the deeper images. However, we found that individual zeropoints obtained from the comparison between PSF photometry of each secondary standard in the deep exposures and aperture photometry in the calibration exposures yielded a considerably larger scatter than when comparing the latter with small-aperture photometry in the deep exposures. The complete list of positions and magnitudes of stars in each region is available electronically only as Table 2 through the Centre de Données Stellaires (Strasbourg, France).
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Figure 1:
Images, color-magnitude, and color-color diagrams of each
region (the full sample can be found in the electronic version of
this paper only). Selected samples are shown in the printed copy,
where J (left), H (center) and K (right) images are
presented for ECX6-24 and ECX6-38. The images display an area of
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A representative sample of our main results can be seen at a glance in Fig. 1, showing images of two selected regions in the J, H, and K filters. The full Fig. 1 (available only in the electronic version of this paper) presents a JHK color composite of each region imaged. Most of the regions show some degree of stellar clustering and a definite extent of the nebula, and only two of them (ECX6-4 and ECX6-26) do not show any signs of either a stellar density enhancement or of nebulosity. Individual images of some regions showing structures in greater detail are presented in Sect. 3.3 when adequate.
It is possible in most cases to roughly delimit the extent of the stellar aggregate near the center of each HII region, allowing us to concentrate in a small area dominated by the population ionizing it. Our choice of the boundaries of the ionizing aggregate in each case where it is easily identified is presented on the K-band image in Fig. 1. Color-magnitude and color-color diagrams are also presented for each region, with the exception of ECX6-7a due to a heavily saturating star that does not allow us to obtain useful photometry. Marked with larger symbols in the diagrams are the stars within the boundaries assigned to the ionizing aggregates. Needless to say, such a definition of the boundaries is highly arbitrary and surely includes within them many stars unrelated to the aggregate. Nevertheless, we have tried to be deliberately conservative when deciding on the boundaries to avoid the opposite, namely that stars that may substantially contribute to the ionization of the HII region may be left outside them. This is of some importance in the ensuing discussion on distance estimates.
A well known drawback with the use of kinematical distances in the
direction of Cygnus is the near-zero radial velocity gradient up
to 2 kpc from the Sun. On the other hand, spectroscopic
distances for the heavily obscured member stars are very
difficult to obtain. Here we propose to combine published radio
continuum fluxes together with a few assumptions on both the
ionized gas and the stellar component to obtain rough estimates
of the distance to each region.
Let us assume that most of the stars within the areas
outlined in Fig. 1 belong to the HII regions. We assume
moreover that foreground and background stars have dereddened
apparent magnitudes fainter than those of the brightest members
of the HII region. In other words, we assume that, in an
unobscured view of the HII region, the brightest stars would be
physical members of it. Finally, we assume that all the stars
contributing to the ionization appear in our images and that
there are no undetected massive stars. To correct approximately
for reddening, we assume that all the stars in the area have
early spectral types and thus their intrinsic color are confined
to a narrow range. We determine the reddening using (H-K) that,
although more likely to be affected by circumstellar emission, is
available also for the most reddened stars that are undetected at
J. The bias introduced by K-band excess is discussed at the
end of this section. Assuming an average intrinsic color
(H-K)0
= -0.04 for OB stars (Tokunaga 2000), the
extinction at H, AH, is
AH = 0.11 + 2.78 (H-K) | (1) |
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(2) |
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(3) |
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(4) |
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(5) |
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(6) |
Wendker et al. (1991) list this source as unresolved
at 408 and 4800 MHz, and suggest a possible association with
DM+38 4000, a O6.5V((f)) star in the Cygnus OB1 association
(Mathys 1989). This is the brightest star of our field
in K, appearing slightly below and to the right of the image in
Fig. 1. We do not detect any signs of clustering or nebulosity in
our images, while the color-color and color-magnitude diagrams
look markedly different from those that we derive for all
the other regions included in the present study. The absence of
strongly reddened sources in this field suggests that the line of sight
is relatively extinction-free up to large distances, so that any
significantly reddened sources in that direction are too distant
to have been recorded in our images. This would also apply to the
HII region if it is not associated with DM+38 4000. The long
distance would most probably place it in the Perseus arm,
implying a large negative radial velocity. Unfortunately, ECX6-4
does not appear in any of the existing emission-line surveys of
the region, thus preventing us from verifying its membership in
either the Perseus or the local arm. It should be noted however
that its relatively high galactic latitude,
,
would
imply a distance greater than 200 pc to the galactic plane at the
distance of the Perseus arm. Given the positional coincidence and
the lack of any other indications of clustering or nebulosity in
the area, we favour the proposed association between ECX6-4 and
DM+38 4000.
ECX6-7a and ECX6-7b are two HII regions probably related to the cluster Berkeley 87 (Turner & Forbes 1982). Berkeley 87 stands out as one of the most interesting and nearby regions of very massive star formation, with coexisting members that illustrate some of the main stages of stellar evolution in that regime. Among them are the WO star ST3 (Pitault 1981; Polcaro et al. 1997); the bright M3.5Ia supergiant BC Cyg (Jura & Kleinmann 1990); the B supergiant HDE 229059, possibly a close binary blue straggler of Cygnus OB1 (Mathys 1987) and the very peculiar variable V 439 Cyg (Polcaro & Norci 1998). A prominent structure likely to belong to Berkeley 87 is ON2, a massive star forming region containing compact HII regions and high density molecular clouds (Elldér et al. 1969; Matthews et al. 1973; Matthews et al. 1986; Dent et al. 1988; Polcaro et al. 1997; Shepherd et al. 1997, and references therein). Interactions between the stellar wind of ST3 and the interstellar medium associated to ON2 or Berkeley 87 has been proposed to be at the origin of the high energy emission observed in that direction of the sky (Polcaro et al. 1991; Manchanda et al. 1996). ECX6-7a and 7b are only two of the compact HII regions observed in this complex (Dent et al. 1988).
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Figure 2: A close-up view of the nebula near ECX6-7a in the K band. The dynamic range has been increased over that of Fig. 1 to clearly show the two bright red stars contained in the nebula. |
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ECX6-7a is detected in our images as a bright, compact infrared
nebula only 45
South of BC Cyg, in the outskirts of the
Berkeley 87 cluster according to the boundaries proposed by
Turner & Forbes. The compact radio source at the position of
ECX6-7a has been identified in many previous studies (e.g. Wink
et al. 1982; Lockman 1989), and is also a
strong IRAS source that has eventually been classified as an
ultracompact HII region (Churchwell et al. 1990).
OH emission at its position has been detected by Cohen et al.
1995. High-resolution radio continuum observations by
Garay et al. (1993) reveal a morphology similar to that
seen in our infrared images, that Garay et al. tentatively
classify as shell-like. The radio continuum flux has been
attributed to an embedded O6 star. We note however that this
stems from the adoption of a distance of 4.1 kpc to this region,
close to the "far'' value allowed by the distance ambiguity. Its
likely association to Berkeley 87 and related objects suggest
instead a much closer distance, of order 900 pc (Turner & Forbes
1982), and the corresponding ionizing flux would
therefore be closer to that of a B0 star. Our H and K band
images reveal two very red point sources with
(the
precise value cannot be determined due to the proximity to BC
Cyg, which is heavily saturated in our images) near the center of
the nebula, which could correspond to the ionizing sources; see
Fig. 2 for more details. Assuming that the depth of Berkeley 87
is of the order of its radius, the physical separation between
BC Cyg and ECX6-7a should be
2 pc at most if both objects
indeed belong to the cluster. The coincidence in the projected
positions of an evolved star like BC Cyg, aged 6-7 Myr (Turner &
Forbes 1982) and a compact HII region like ECX6-7a
where star formation is much more recent or even still going on
argues for a complex evolutionary story of Berkeley 87, with
nearly contiguous star forming sites evolving at markedly
different speeds, as opposed to a more or less ordered wave of
star formation moving as a definite pattern across the cloud.
ECX6-7b is more centrally located with respect to the main body of
ON2. JHK imaging shows ECX6-7b as a moderately reddened,
compact nebula approximately 1'3 across containing an embedded
cluster that is apparent only in H in K. The three bright,
lightly obscured stars of
that appear less than 1'Southwest of the core of the nebula are probably unrelated
foreground stars, as their colors are bluer than those of
most stars in the central cluster. We have nevertheless included
them within the area of the cluster in Fig. 1, and they appear
as the three dots at the top left of the color-magnitude diagram.
We find stars with largely varying degrees of
reddening both in this area and outside it, reaching extinctions
of up to AV = 30 mag as derived from the color-color diagram.
On the other hand, the brightest stars in the cluster tend to
appear to the right of the reddening sequence in Fig. 1,
indicating substantial amounts of circumstellar emission in the
K band.
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Figure 3:
A detailed view of ECX6-7b and the field around it in K.
The dashed line roughly shows the boundary of ON2 as traced by
12CO
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A comparison with the high resolution maps in 12CO, SiO,
H13CO and SO2 of Shepherd et al. (1997) shows
that the reddened cluster of stars and nebulosity that appears in
our JHK images is actually immediately Southwest of the main
concentration of high density tracers, which is otherwise
invisible in the near-infrared images. ECX6-7b may thus be a
blister HII region where newly formed stars are disrupting the
dense molecular cloud that still composes the core of ON2. Very
high resolution observations by Hofner & Churchwell
(1996) reveal a complex of three water masers
associated with a subarcsecond-sized cometary ultracompact HII
region near the interface between the core of ON2 and the
near-infrared cluster. Possibly variable methanol emission is
also detected in the region (Menten 1991; Szymczak et al. 2000), although the lower resolution of those
observations prevents an accurate identification. It is
interesting to note that exactly at the position of water masers
numbers 1, 2, and 4 studied by Hofner & Churchwell, we detect an
extremely red point source with K = 13.3,
which may
be its near-infrared counterpart (Fig. 3). This offers the
potential of spectroscopically studying the deeply embedded star,
a possibility rarely found (Watson & Hanson 1997).
Another very red source (K = 12.9, H-K = 2.9) appears 15'' to
the West-Southwest of it. Two other water masers mapped by Hofner
& Churchwell (1996) appear closer to the core of the
infrared nebulosity, but without an obvious near-infrared
counterpart.
In view of the evidence on the complexity of this region and the existence of essential components undetected in our images, our distance estimate of 0.7 kpc is probably not very meaningful. Due to the marginal detection at H and the impossibility of obtaining a reliable estimate of the reddening, the near-infrared counterpart of the ultracompact component is not included in our census of ionizing stars, although it may be the dominant contributor to the radio continuum flux measured by Wendker et al. (1991). On the other hand, some of the sources for which we find the brightest dereddened magnitudes fall below the reddening sequence in Fig. 1, probably indicating that the K-band flux is dominated by circumstellar emission. Since these effects move our distance estimate in opposite directions, we regard our value of 0.7 kpc as very uncertain. The reasonable proximity to the value of 0.9 kpc proposed by Turner & Forbes (1982) for Berkeley 87 is thus probably fortuitous.
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Figure 4: A detailed view of the red, compact object at the position of ECX6-11 (K-band image), showing an extended, bilobular structure around the central source which is barely resolved. |
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No obvious cluster is seen at the position of this source, but right at the center we find a very red extended source, seen in detail in Fig. 4, whose position is coincident with that of the ultracompact HII region IRAS 20220+3728. This object appears in numerous studies of molecular line and radio continuum emission, having been detected in NH3 (Molinari et al. 1996) and HCO+ (Richards et al. 1987); see Chan et al. (1996) for a compilation of data. Moderate-velocity 12CO emission is detected by Shepherd & Churchwell (1996). No water maser emission is detected at its position (Palla et al. 1991), but weak emission is detected approximately 1'North of it at a location where no obvious counterpart is visible in our images (Scalise et al. 1989). The LSR velocity of this component, -35.4 km s-1, is very different from that measured at the position of IRAS 20220+3728 (-2.7 km s-1 from NH3 lines, and similar values from other observations), indicating that both sources are probably unrelated.
VLA observations by Kurtz et al. (1994) at 3.6 and 2 cm reveal a complex, multiple-peaked morphology with an overall shell-like arrangement. The peaks are also identified in VLA observations at 6 cm by Molinari et al. (1998). The shell has two bright caps readily visible in the 3.6 cm map of Kurtz et al. which approximately coincide with the elongation in the NE-SW direction that the source has in our K band image. Interestingly, the minimum of emission at centimeter wavelengths coincides with the almost point-like bright nucleus seen in our H and K images (K = 12.3, H-K = 2.4). The comparison between the near-infrared and centimeter observations suggests a shell morphology for this very compact HII region, producing a bright rim detected in the VLA images and a not very obscured center that dominates the near-infrared image. The marginally resolved appearance of the core suggests that the emission from the nucleus is not purely stellar.
Despite the compact aspect of ECX6-11 in our images, several
very red objects are seen within a 1' radius of it, the two most
extreme having K = 13.6, H-K = 3.1 and K = 14.4,
.
This may mean that ECX6-11 is a member of a highly obscured
cluster whose other members do not possess the massive dust
envelopes that cause the bright IRAS-detected emission of the
former. The color-magnitude and color-color diagrams of the
region also shows a large scatter in reddenings and a few objects
occupying the region of circumstellar excess.
A kinematical "far'' distance of 4.0-4.5 kpc to ECX6-11 has been
adopted in most works. Using the photometry of the central,
marginally resolved source given above in combination with the
4.8 GHz flux of Wendker et al. (1991) and applying Eq.
(6), we obtain a distance
kpc, thus suggesting
that the "short'' solution to the distance ambiguity should be
used instead. Nevertheless, the ionizing flux estimated by
Molinari et al. (1998) using the "far'' distance is
only
s-1, corresponding to a
B0 ionizing star (Schaerer & de Koter 1997).
Reducing the distance to 1 kpc would imply a decrease in Q0 by
a factor of 20 and an even later spectral type,
B2. We
thus believe that the lower limit obtained from the application
of Eq. (6) may be a large underestimate of the distance in the
present case, perhaps due mostly to a substantial contribution of
circumstellar emission to the near-infrared photometry or to
substantial absorption of ionizing photons by dust.
ECX6-12 appears in our images, shown in Fig. 1, as a small
ring-shaped nebula with a diameter of 50''. The
color-magnitude diagram shows that most of the objects in the
area of the nebula are moderately reddened, with
mag. Curiously, most of the objects in the area of the
nebula seem to have circumstellar excess. This suggests a
substantial underestimate of the distance as derived from Eq.
(6), which at 1.7 kpc is already relatively large. This is
confirmed by the kinematics of its radio recombination lines,
whose LSR velocity is -28.2 km s-1 (Lockman
1989) clearly indicating membership in the Perseus
arm. ECX6-12 appears in different radio continuum galactic plane
surveys, but no detailed studies on it or its immediate
surroundings appear to have been published to date.
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Figure 5: An enlarged view of the K-band image of ECX6-15 (=DR6) with a reduced dynamic range to emphasize the nebulosity and the distribution of obscuring material. The position of the two faint, very red sources mentioned in the text is marked. |
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This source is best known as DR 6, one of the compact components
of the IC 1318 complex. DR 6 is located between IC 1318b and c
(Campbell et al. 1981). The region appears extended
in the IRAS bands (Odenwald & Schwartz 1993), but
its far-infrared emission (Odenwald et al. 1986)
roughly coincides with the radio continuum size,
(Wendker et al. 1991). The latter matches well the
size of the nebulosity seen in our images. A close correlation
between the shape of the nebula in the infrared images and that
mapped at 6 cm with the VLA by Odenwald et al. (1986)
is seen. The most remarkable difference between both is the dark
ridge crossing our images from SW to NE, roughly at the position
where the centimeter emission peaks, showing that most of the
radio continuum flux comes from a region obscured by a thick dust
lane (see Fig. 5). On the other hand, concentrations "C'' and
"E'' in the 6 cm map of Odenwald et al. are not easily identified
in our images, although two very red sources (K = 13.5, H-K =
2.7 and K = 15.3,
)
are seen in the direction of
concentration "C''. This suggests the existence of large column
densities of dust in those directions as well.
Due to the large extent of the nebula and the richness of the field, our "member selection'' criterion may be including many foreground stars in the census of possible ionizing stars when trying to compute the distance. Despite this, our estimate of 1.0 kpc is consistent with its association to the IC 1318 complex (distance 1.5 kpc, consistent with the LSR velocity of -0.7 km s-1; Odenwald & Schwartz 1993). The color-magnitude and color-color diagrams in Fig. 1 show a large scatter of extinctions, roughly between AV=0 and AV = 25 mag. Most stars lie along the band defined by normal reddened main sequence stars, and a few moderately reddened objects in the region of circumstellar excesses. The overall picture of DR 6 as a cluster of HII regions powered by early B stars proposed by Odenwald et al. (1986) is consistent with our near-infrared observations.
ECX6-18 is the DR 7 complex. At first sight, many characteristics of the radio continuum and far infrared emission are similar to those of DR 6 (Odenwald et al. 1986), but the distances to both complexes are very different as seen from highly negative radial velocity of DR 7 (-40 km s-1; Piepenbrink & Wendker 1988; Lockman 1989). The kinematical distance, about 7.5 kpc, places it in the Perseus arm and about five times farther than DR 6. A distance significantly larger than that of DR 6 is also indicated by our non-kinematical estimate of D > 3.6 kpc. In our infrared images (Fig. 1) the nebulosity is evident in H and especially K, with all its area covered with faint red stars. Nothing is seen at visible wavelengths, where the field surrounding DR 7 is pervaded by tenuous nebulosity but not at the position of the region itself. The color-magnitude diagram shows the existence of many faint stars at the position of the nebula with varying amounts of reddening. No object is detected with large K-band excess. Like in the case of DR 6, the overall shape and extent of the near infrared emission is coincident with that of the radio continuum, except for the fact that the strongly peaked component "B'' of the maps of Odenwald et al. (1986) is much less conspicuous in our images, where it appears near the Eastern edge. The much redder color that we appreciate in this component when comparing to the rest of the nebulosity probably indicates that it lies behind a screen of higher extinction.
Two ultracompact HII components have been detected in DR 7 (Kurtz et al. 1994). We detect a barely resolved red source at the position of one of them, G79.320+1.313, with K = 12.6, H-K = 2.6, J-H = 2.1. The other one is undetected in our images, and lies at the position of concentration "B'' in the radio continuum map of Odenwald et al. (1986). The higher foreground extinction towards this concentration, as noted above, may be the reason for the non-detection of this second ultracompact component. None of these ultracompact sources has been detected to have associated water or methanol maser emission (Codella et al. 1996; Slysh et al. 1999).
The large size of DR 7 implied by its kinematical distance and the apparent extent of 2.5 arcmin that it has in our images qualifies it as a classical, Orion-like HII complex, rather than as a compact one as may be expected from the size-based selection criterion of our sample if belonging to the local arm.
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Figure 6: An enlarged view of ECX6-20 in the K band, showing in more detail the arc-shaped extended emission described in the text. |
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The region ECX6-20 is dominated by a very compact, moderately reddened cluster whose three brightest stars have K = 10.1, H-K = 0.8; K = 10.2, H-K = 0.7; and K = 9.2, H-K = 0.30. These are components of the multiple system CCDM J20296+3901C (Dommanget 1983). Two other, less conspicuous clusters are visible in the infrared frames as well, one to the West dominated by a star of K = 11.6, H-K = 1.1, and another one to the North with two stars of K = 9.8, H-K = 0.7 and K = 9.3, H-K = 1.2 respectively. Its velocity (-5.5 km s-1 from radio recombination lines, Lockman 1989; -2.9 km s-1 from associated CS emission, Bronfman et al. 1996) places it in the local arm, in consistency with our distance estimate (1.5 kpc) and with the low extinction in its direction.
An ultracompact component is detected in radio continuum observations
in the direction of the main cluster (Kurtz et al.
1994), but the high stellar density with overlapping
PSFs of bright stars in this region does not allow us to identify
it in our infrared images. The ultracompact component is
associated with extended emission mapped by Kurtz et al.
(1999) that we also see easily in our K-band images
(Fig. 6). The extended emission starts at the central cluster
in the East-West direction and then bends Northwards, especially
in the Eastern arm which is the most conspicuous one. Peaks in the
centimeter emission are also seen in Kurtz et al.'s maps at the
position of the two secondary clusters. An intriguing difference
between the near-infrared and the radio continuum emission is
that the former is much more narrowly confined to a ridge that
outlines the Southern edge of the latter, giving it a clear
arc-like appearance that is much less obvious in the radio
continuum maps. The arc can be traced for almost 180starting from the cluster and has a radius of
40'' or >0.29 pc at a distance >1.5 kpc. The Western arm is much less
visible both in the infrared and in the radio, and it contains
the Western subcluster. The position of dense clusters at the
edge of such an arc suggests that their formation might have been
externally triggered by an energetic event that produced an
expanding bubble around it (e.g. Elmegreen 1998).
![]() |
Figure 7: An enlarged view of ECX6-21 in K, enhancing the nebulosity. The position of the very red source at the center of the ring that may be the counterpart of the ultracompact component is marked. Also noted are two very red sources referred to in the text. For comparison, an image of the same field at visible wavelengths from the Digitized Sky Survey is shown in the bottom panel. |
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The most detailed study existing to date on ECX6-21 is that of
Odenwald & Schwartz (1989), who were the first to
note the association of IRAS 20286+4105, an IRAS point source
with a steeply rising spectrum in the 12-100 m range, with a
nicely delineated elliptical ring in visible images. They obtained
12CO
observations able to resolve the
object and provide kinematical information giving hints of radial
motion or rotation of the ring, but without conclusive results on
this point. The colors of the IRAS source are those of an
ultracompact HII region, and its low resolution IRAS spectrum is
typical of a HII region as well (Kwok et al. 1997). The
IRAS source is likely to lie at the geometrical center of the
ring, where emission from high density tracers such as NH3(Molinari et al. 1996) and CS (Bronfman et al.
1996) is detected. Water maser emission is also
found at that position (Palla et al. 1991).
In our infrared images (Fig. 7) the ring is not seen so clearly as such, and it is interesting to note that its outline is somewhat less regular than in the visible. Its area is filled with very faint emission and a decrease in stellar density can be noted within its contour, indicating that the ring is filled with obscuring material. A very red source with K = 15.5 and undetected in H appears near the center, consistent with the position of the ultracompact component. Unfortunately, no published high resolution observations exist allowing a sub-arcsecond positioning of the ultracompact source, so the identification is tentative only. Other red sources appear just North of the moderate concentration of stars near the Eastern edge of the ring. The Southernmost star of this group is a double with components having K = 9.7, H-K = 0.6, J-H = 0.6 and K=10.3, H-K = 1.1, J-H = 2.1, respectively; only the bluer component appears in visible images as a rather inconspicuous object within the ring.
The radial velocity of ECX6-21, -3.9 km s-1 (Bronfman et al. 1996), places it in the local arm and is consistent with the lower limit of 1.0 kpc that we estimate. Although this is identical to the value of 1.0 kpc adopted by Odenwald & Schwartz (1989), our determination must be taken with special caution in this case, however: as indicated in Fig. 1, our distance estimate considers the brightest stars to the East of the ring, coincident with the brightest part of the nebulosity, as the ones causing the ionization, and neglects the contribution of the ultracompact component. On the other hand, two of the stars in the area with the reddest H-K color have blue J-H that could indicate circumstellar excess, and we may thus be overestimating their contributions to the ionizing flux.
While nothing particular is seen in visible-light images of the area where ECX6-24 is located, near-infrared images reveal a fairly rich cluster of faint, moderately reddened sources (Fig. 1) clearly standing out over the stellar background. No heavily reddened sources or traces of nebulosity are seen in that direction: the associated radio source is so far identified only in radio continuum (Wendker et al. 1991) and radio recombination lines (Lockman 1989), with no indications of dense gas or embedded sources detectable by IRAS. The size and orientation of the radio-detected HII region (Wendker et al. 1991) are in good agreement with those of the cluster as seen in our images.
The LSR velocity measured by Lockman (1989) is
-5.1 km s-1, indicating that the region belongs to the
local arm. This can also be inferred from its relatively high
galactic latitude, .
We believe that our estimated
distance to the region in this case is more reliable than in the
ones discussed so far, given the absence of evidence for unseen
members of the cluster contributing to the ionization, and the
dominance of the cluster population within the selected
boundaries of the cluster expected from the density contrast with
the background. We also note that the vast majority of stars that
we consider as contributors to the ionization are located in the
no-excess area of the color-color diagram, thus suggesting that
our dereddening procedure is essentially correct in this case and
does not result in a substantial underestimate of the distance.
In view of this, the distance that we derive, 2.7 kpc, is likely
to be near the true one. We note that such a distance, while still
being consistent with membership in the local arm, places ECX6-24
behind most of the major structures in Cygnus X (Odenwald &
Schwartz 1993).
![]() |
Figure 8: A detailed view of ECX6-25 (K band) showing the position of the objects and features noted in the text. |
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The region ECX6-25 = DR 15 has been studied in detail at far
infrared, molecular line, and radio continuum wavelengths by
Odenwald et al. (1990). The overall appearance in the
far infrared (40-250 m) shows a main peak of emission,
related to their source FIR 1 (=IRAS 20306+4005), and a secondary
peak to the Southwest, perhaps associated to IRAS 20293+3953. The
latter is well outside the boundaries of our near-infrared images
and is not discussed here. The appearance at visible wavelengths
in the Digitized Sky Survey images shows a two-component
structure in our field, a rather compact one to the Northwest and
a diffuse one to the Southeast, with no visible nebulosity in
between. The near-infrared images show that this is due to dust
obscuration, revealing bright nebulosity joining both regions and
a higher density of reddened stars in this region, probably a
cluster physically related to DR 15. Only the densest parts of the
dust lane are seen in the near-infrared image as a much thinner
dark band that crosses the nebula from Northeast to Southwest.
The VLA radio continuum maps of Odenwald et al.
(1990) show a broad peak of the radio continuum
emission roughly coincident with the center of the dark band.
A sharper peak of radio continuum emission coincides with the
position of FIR 1, that lies at the Western edge of the dust lane
and is not seen in our images. The K-band image shows however
that the lane is disrupted near this position by a bright,
arc-like feature with FIR 1 in its concavity, vaguely resembling
a bow shock. This is shown in more detail in Fig. 8. At the
position of FIR 1 Kurtz et al. (1994) have mapped an
ultracompact component that appears elongated perpendicular to
the direction of the dust lane at 3.6 cm, and is resolved into
several aligned peaks at 2 cm, suggesting the presence of a
collimated outflow. The high resolution maps of Kurtz et al. also
suggest that collimation takes place at scales of 1'' or less,
while the dust lane can be traced in the infrared by at least
75''. The existence of a large-scale disk-like feature, possibly
associated with a hypothetical disk that may play an important
role in collimating the outflow of the embedded object at the
core of FIR 1, is reminiscent of the structure of another bipolar
HII region studied in much more detail, S 106 (e.g. Roberts et
al. 1995; but see also Barsony et al.
1989). Based mostly on morphological arguments,
Odenwald et al. (1990) suggest that DR 15 may have
formed as a result of the collision of two molecular clouds,
giving rise in particular to FIR 1 at the collision interface.
The sparse reddened cluster that we find in our near-infrared
images may have formed as a consequence of this process as well.
Kinematics does not provide much evidence for this scenario,
although the discrepancies among observations of different
components do suggest a rather complicated pattern of motions, at
least in the vicinity of FIR 1: the LSR velocity measured by
Lockman (1989) from recombination lines at low
spatial resolution is +8.5 km s-1, while 12CO
profiles in the direction near FIR 1 give components between -5and 0 km s-1. Also in that same direction, Bronfman et al.
(1996) measure +3.7 km s-1 in the CS
line. Other measurements in that range are quoted
in Wendker et al. (1991).
Our infrared images also show hints of filamentary structure, the most conspicuous being a roughly semicircular arc that surrounds two bright stars in the Northern component and an extended wisp extending outwards at the Southeastern corner of the nebula. This wisp starts approximately at the position of IRS 1 (Kleinmann et al. 1979), a bright red source with K = 8.9, H-K = 1.7, J-H = 2.7. Interestingly, the radio continuum map does not show this filament, but a protuberance appears instead at the Southern edge, containing Kleinmann et al.'s source IRS 3. We hypothesize that this protuberance and the near-infrared filament may be a part of a single bubble-like structure, like the one that we described earlier in our discussion of ECX6-20, whose brighter part at radio wavelengths is too obscured for detection in our infrared images.
The color-color and color-magnitude diagrams show the existence
of a mostly faint population of stars with extinctions ranging
from 0 to 25 mag in the visible. Our distance estimate of
0.4 kpc in the present case is rather puzzling, as the region
most surely lies considerable farther, probably at least in the
far side of the Cygnus ridge as proposed by Wendker et al.
(1991), at around
1 kpc. The star assumed to
dominate the ionizing flux according to our prescription is IRS 3
(Fig. 8), that becomes the brightest star in the field after
dereddening. Its colors show no indication of strong infrared
excess, implying that our dereddening procedure should be
approximately valid. On the other hand, the high resolution radio
maps show that a large fraction of the centimeter flux is
contributed by FIR 1, that is not detected by us and therefore is
not taken into account in our census of candidate ionizing stars.
For the reasons given at the end of Sect. 3.2, neglecting the
contribution of FIR 1 should produce an overestimate of the
distance, rather than an underestimate. The possibility that
IRS 3 does not actually belong of DR 15, thus leading to a
substantial underestimate of the distance, seems rather unlikely
in view of its brightness, red colors, and location in the region.
A possible explanation of the distance discrepancy might be that
the HII region is density bounded, with a large number of
ionizing photons leaking out of it (Sect. 3.2). An alternative
explanation based on absorption of a large fraction of ionizing
photons by dust seems ruled out by the analysis of Odenwald et
al. (1990), who concluded that the HII region inside
FIR 1 is almost dust-free.
Nothing obvious is seen at the position of ECX6-26 in our infrared images. This is a relatively faint, extended source in Wendker et al. (1991) also detected in other radio continuum surveys of the galactic plane. It may be associated to the infrared source IRAS 20316+4155, a possible young object near Cygnus OB2 (Parthasarathy et al. 1992). However, the lack of any additional information, in particular radial velocities or near-infrared detection, precludes any firm conclusion on its location and nature. The field where this source is located contains mostly faint stars with low-to-moderate reddening, the brightest star appearing in the Southeastern corner of our images having K = 7.8.
The region ECX6-27 appears projected near the core of the Cygnus
OB2 association, but the large negative radial velocity
(-62.4 km s-1, Lockman 1989;
-66.4 km s-1, Bronfman et al. 1996) exclude a
possible physical link between both (see also Piepenbrink &
Wendker 1988). The near-infrared images show two
distinct concentrations separated by 75'', corresponding
to 3.5 pc at an assumed distance of 10 kpc for the outer arm
where ECX6-27 probably lies. The main one (to the Northwest, just
left and below the center of the image) coincides with the
position of IRAS 20321+4112, an object with the mid-infrared
colors of an ultracompact HII regions where CS emission is
detected by Bronfman et al. (1996). However, most of
the radio emission must be dominated by an optically thin
component, as noted by Wendker et al. (1991) from the
very shallow spectral index between 408 and 4800 MHz. The HII
region is associated to an extended, cold HI cloud found at the
same position and velocity (Wendker 1984). Our distance
estimate of 3.3 kpc, while being the second highest in our sample, is
most probably heavily contaminated by foreground stars.
Name | ![]() |
![]() |
Distance (Eq. (6)) | Description |
ECX6-4 | 20:18:31.1 | +38:51:22 | No nebula or cluster. Probably associated to the O6.5V((f)) star | |
DM+38 4000 | ||||
ECX6-7a | 20:21:39.1 | +37:31:17 | Compact, in Berkeley 87, near M supergiant BC Cyg | |
ECX6-7b | 20:21:41.3 | +37:26:10 | 0.7 kpc | Possible blister in ON2, ultracompact component detected in K |
ECX6-11 | 20:23:55.7 | +37:38:13 | Isolated and elongated. Ultracompact component at the center | |
marginally resolved | ||||
ECX6-12 | 20:25:23.2 | +37:23:10 | 1.7 kpc | Ring-shaped, in Perseus arm. Distance underestimated from Eq. (6) |
ECX6-15 | 20:27:13.0 | +39:26:08 | 1.0 kpc | DR 6. Cluster with bright amorphous nebulosity |
ECX6-18 | 20:28:10.1 | +40:52:00 | 3.6 kpc | DR 7. Amorphous nebulosity, cluster of faint stars, in Perseus arm. |
Distance underestimated from Eq. (6) | ||||
ECX6-20 | 20:29:37.1 | +39:01:59 | 1.5 kpc | Compact aggregate at the center, large arcs extending from it |
ECX6-21 | 20:30:27.1 | +41:15:40 | 1.0 kpc | Ring-shaped in visible, filled with emission in K. |
Possible central ultracompact source seen in K | ||||
ECX6-24 | 20:32:21.7 | +43:41:12 | 2.7 kpc | Well-defined cluster, no apparent nebulosity |
ECX6-25 | 20:32:31.2 | +40:16:35 | 0.4 kpc | DR 15. Large-scale arcs, rich aggregate. Ultracompact component |
undetected | ||||
ECX6-26 | 20:33:23.0 | +42:04:47 | Nothing obvious detected | |
ECX6-27 | 20:33:55.3 | +41:23:03 | 3.3 kpc | Double concentration with faint reddened stars. In outer arm |
behind Cygnus OB2, distance underestimated from Eq. (6) | ||||
ECX6-38 | 20:45:38.9 | +44:15:09 | 0.8 kpc | Near Pelican nebula, compact cluster at center of fan-shaped |
bright nebulosity, probably blister-like |
The HII region ECX6-38 is a bright compact nebula easily seen
in wide-angle pictures of the North America-Pelican nebula
complex, located 0
West of the latter. Its location
in the direction of that complex and in front of the Cygnus rift
strongly suggest a distance of less than 1 kpc, consistent with
the LSR velocity measured in radio recombination lines by
Piepenbrink & Wendker (1988) and Lockman
(1989) (-6.6 km s-1 and -8.5 km s-1,
respectively). The distance that we estimate, 0.8 kpc, is thus
probably close to the actual value. The structure of this nebula
is much more clear in our near-infrared images, where it displays
a clear fan-shaped morphology opened towards the South-Southeast.
Near the vertex of the fan a very compact cluster of moderately
reddened stars is detected. Some of them can be seen at visible
wavelengths, especially the brightest star in the cluster that has
.
We measure K = 8.4, H-K = 0.5, J-H = 0.6for this star and resolve a somewhat fainter companion about 1
5
to the South.
The extent of the nebula, its surface brightness in the visible,
and probably also its distance are similar to those of S 106, and
in view of this it may seem somewhat surprising the large
difference in attention that both have received so far. However,
the structures of both nebulae are markedly different, as well as
the characteristics of the stars responsible for the excitation.
Despite of the existence of a compact cluster at the core of
ECX6-38, most of the ionizing flux is most likely provided by the
brightest star whose VJHK magnitudes are given in the preceding
paragraph. The dereddened H magnitude that we estimate, 7.1, implies a spectral type around B2 at the distance of
700 pc, and thus an ionizing flux well below that supplied by the
deeply embedded O9/B0 star that excites S 106 (Hodapp & Rayner
1991). The absence of any IRAS source associated to
ECX6-38 indicates that it contains no bright embedded source and
that our census of its brightest members is thus complete (Price
et al. 1982 give fluxes at 11 and 20
m for the
associated source G84.0+0.8, but given the coarse resolution of
their observations the association is doubtful; we thus give more
weight to the IRAS non-detection).
Finally, it is interesting to note that the fan-shaped morphology with a compact cluster located at the vertex is very suggestive of a champagne blowout (Tenorio-Tagle 1979) produced when the initial HII region reached the boundary of the parental molecular cloud. On the other hand, the bright rimmed appearance of the opening of the fan suggests that it is filled with a rarified medium such as a stellar wind, rather than a denser stream of ionized gas initially in the cloud (Comerón 1997). The compactness of the cluster as compared to the overall extent of the nebula, as well as the apparently simple geometry, suggest ECX6-38 as an appropriate case study for the modeling of the dynamical interaction between moderately massive stars and the interstellar medium. Such a study would greatly benefit from high resolution radio continuum maps and kinematical information such as that currently available for many of the regions studied here.
We have described the results of our JHK imaging survey of compact HII regions in the direction of the Cygnus X molecular complex. Observations at these wavelengths are largely unimpeded by dust extinction and are optimally suited for simultaneously studying both the nebulosity and the stars ionizing it. Our images illustrate indeed a large variety of morphologies among the former, and reveal aggregates of varying richness among the latter. A very brief summary of the main characteristics of each region is given in Table 1 to illustrate this diversity.
We have provided rough non-kinematical estimates of distances to our targets, based on a comparison of the stellar contents to the radio continuum flux, that are also listed in Table 1. In practice, the validity of the method is limited by a number of assumptions concerning membership, dereddening, and completeness of the stellar component. Actual cases in which these assumptions appear to be invalid or in which unrealistic distances are obtained have been discussed.
Our descriptions of individual regions in the light of previously
published material in other domains stress the importance of
multiwavelength observations in disclosing their structures and
the relationship between their stellar and gaseous components. A
variety of morphological features (bubble-like, ring-shaped, arc-shaped,
fan-shaped) are revealed by our images that are not seen at other
wavelengths and resolutions. Such features suggest these regions as test
cases for models of the dynamical interaction between the energetic
output of massive stars and their surrounding gas. On the other hand,
the observations presented here provide likely near-infrared counterparts
of a number of known ultracompact HII regions, which appear unresolved
or only barely resolved at an arcsecond scale, implying linear sizes of
order 0.01 pc or smaller. The new detection at K of these
objects, so far observed only in the radio domain, suggests that
spectroscopic studies of the embedded star or its immediate surroundings
should be possible, thus providing a valuable complement to the existing
radio observations.
We conclude by pointing out that the broad band, survey nature of our near-infrared observations leaves much room for follow-up detailed studies in the same spectral region. Narrow-band imaging through selected filters would be very helpful in exploring the nature of the extended emission, and particularly in separating the respective contributions of recombination emission, H2deexcitation, and continuum emission of small heated grains, leading to a much better characterization of the physical and dynamical conditions in the nebulae. On the stellar side, higher resolution imaging is needed for improved photometry, given the crowdedness of the fields. At the same time, deeper observations would be helpful to sample not only the lower-mass component of the associated aggregates, but also more deeply embedded massive objects that may not have been detected in our observations. Finally, the regions studied here offer a fairly large sample of young O and B-type stars suitable for spectral classification in the infrared, which will allow a much better characterization of the intrinsic properties of the stellar component of each HII region.
Acknowledgements
It is a pleasure to thank the staff of the Observatorio del Teide in Tenerife, and very especially to Dr. María Rosa Zapatero Osorio, for excellent support during the observations. The help of Ms. Petia Andreeva during the observing run and in the preparation of the figures presented in this paper is warmly acknowledged. Useful comments from the referee, Dr. S. Molinari, are also appreciated. This paper made extensive use of the SIMBAD Database maintained at the Centre de Données Stellaires in Strasbourg, France.