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arxiv 2103.02049 v1 pith:HHECNGCB submitted 2021-03-02 astro-ph.GA

A VLA Census of the Galactic H II Region Population

classification astro-ph.GA
keywords radioregionscontinuumregioncandidatesgalacticmilkypopulation
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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The Milky Way contains thousands of H II region candidates identified by their characteristic mid-infrared morphology, but lacking detections of ionized gas tracers such as radio continuum or radio recombination line emission. These targets thus remain unconfirmed as H II regions. With only $\sim$2500 confirmed H II regions in the Milky Way, Galactic surveys are deficient by several thousand nebulae when compared to external galaxies with similar star formation rates. Using sensitive 9 GHz radio continuum observations with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), we explore a sample of H II region candidates in order to set observational limits on the actual total population of Galactic H II regions. We target all infrared-identified "radio quiet" sources from the WISE Catalog of Galactic H II regions between $245^{\circ}\geq\ell\geq90^{\circ}$ with infrared diameters less than 80$^{\prime\prime}$. We detect radio continuum emission from 50% of the targeted H II region candidates, providing strong evidence that most of the radio quiet candidates are bona fide HII regions. We measure the peak and integrated radio flux densities and compare the inferred Lyman continuum fluxes using models of OB-stars. We conclude that stars of approximately spectral type B2 and earlier are able to create H II regions with similar infrared and radio continuum morphologies as the more luminous H II regions created by O-stars. From our 50% detection rate of "radio quiet" sources, we set a lower limit of $\sim$7000 for the H II region population of the Galaxy. Thus the vast majority of the Milky Way's H II regions remain to be discovered.

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Cited by 1 Pith paper

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Constraints on the properties of warm ionized gas from low-frequency hydrogen radio recombination lines

    astro-ph.GA 2026-07 conditional novelty 5.5

    Forward modeling of multi-frequency HRRLs at 342 MHz, 800 MHz and 5.8 GHz constrains electron densities of dense warm ionized gas in the Galactic plane to 6–15 cm^{-3}.