Schedule Aug 16, 2007
The Search for Massive Protostars
Maite Beltran (Univ. Barcelona)

In the last few years we have been deeply involved in the study of a handful of OB star forming regions. In particular, we have concentrated on the search for circumstellar accretion disks and toroids. Among the others, one object stands unique: the hypercompact HII region G24.78+0.08 A1, ionised by an O9.5 star and located at a distance of 7.7 kpc. Interferometric observations have provided us evidence of infall in the circumstellar rotating toroid that is enshrouding this luminous star. Besides being one of the rare direct detections of infall in a young high-mass star, our finding is important for the simultaneous presence of three elements in the same massive object: a rotating, collapsing toroid, a bipolar outflow, ejected along the rotation axis, and a hypercompact ionised HII region. The large accretion rate and the existence of a hypercompact HII region confirm that the accretion cannot be spherically symmetric and must occur in a circumstellar disk.

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