The Green Bank Telescope HII Region Discovery Survey: III. Kinematic Distances

TL;DR

This study uses HI emission/absorption to resolve distances for 149 HII regions, revealing their distribution and spiral structure in the Milky Way with high accuracy, including the discovery of the most distant HII regions.

Contribution

It provides a large, reliable set of kinematic distances for HII regions, improving understanding of Galactic structure and challenging previous assumptions about bubble HII regions' locations.

Findings

82% of HII regions have determined distances

Most HII regions are at the far distance or tangent point

Discovered the most distant HII regions up to 20kpc

Abstract

Using the HI Emission/Absorption method, we resolve the kinematic distance ambiguity and derive distances for 149 of 182 (82%) HII regions discovered by the Green Bank Telescope HII Region Discovery Survey (GBT HRDS). The HRDS is an X-band (9GHz, 3cm) GBT survey of 448 previously unknown HII regions in radio recombination line and radio continuum emission. Here we focus on HRDS sources from 67deg. > l > 18deg., where kinematic distances are more reliable. The 25 HRDS sources in this zone that have negative recombination line velocities are unambiguously beyond the orbit of the Sun, up to 20kpc distant. They are the most distant HII regions yet discovered. We find that 61% of HRDS sources are located at the far distance, 31% at the tangent point distance, and only 7% at the near distance. "Bubble" HII regions are not preferentially at the near distance (as was assumed previously) but average 10kpc from the Sun. The HRDS nebulae, when combined with a large sample of HII regions with previously known distances, show evidence of spiral structure in two circular arc segments of mean Galactocentric radii of 4.25 and 6.0kpc. We perform a thorough uncertainty analysis to analyze the effect of using different rotation curves, streaming motions, and a change to the Solar circular rotation speed. The median distance uncertainty for our sample of HII regions is only 0.5kpc, or 5%. This is significantly less than the median difference between the near and far kinematic distances, 6kpc. The basic Galactic structure results are unchanged after considering these sources of uncertainty.