Paper detail

The cometary HII regions of DR 21: Bow shocks or champagne flows or both?

We present deep Very Large Array H66$α$ radio recombination line (RRL) observations of the two cometary HII regions in DR 21. With these sensitive data, we test the "hybrid" bow shock/champagne flow model previously proposed for the DR 21 HII regions. The ionized gas down the tail of the southern HII region is redshifted by up to ~30 km/s with respect to the ambient molecular gas, as expected in the hybrid scenario. The RRL velocity structure, however, reveals the presence of two velocity components in both the northern and southern HII regions. This suggests that the ionized gas is flowing along cone-like shells, swept-up by stellar winds. The observed velocity structure of the well-resolved southern HII region is most consistent with a picture that combines a stellar wind with stellar motion (as in bow shock models) along a density gradient (as in champagne flow models). The direction of the implied density gradient is consistent with that suggested by maps of dust continuum and molecular line emission in the DR 21 region.