Infrared appearance of wind-blown bubbles around young massive stars

TL;DR

This paper investigates the physical processes shaping infrared bubbles around young massive stars, focusing on stellar winds, radiation pressure, and dust grain dynamics, through chemo-dynamical modeling to understand their morphology.

Contribution

It introduces a chemo-dynamical model that varies stellar wind parameters to analyze their effects on bubble morphology and infrared appearance.

Findings

Stellar winds significantly influence bubble shape and infrared features.

Radiation pressure alone cannot explain dust removal in bubbles.

Different dust grain sizes respond differently to stellar radiation and winds.

Abstract

Thousands of ring-like bubbles appear on infrared images of the Galaxy plane. Most of these infrared bubbles form during expansion of HII regions around massive stars. However, the physical effects that determine their morphology are still under debate. Namely, the absence of the infrared emission toward the centres of the bubbles can be explained by pushing the dust grains by stellar radiation pressure. At the same time, small graphite grains and PAHs are not strongly affected by the radiation pressure and must be removed by another process. Stellar ultraviolet emission can destroy the smallest PAHs but the photodestruction is ineffective for the large PAHs. Meanwhile, the stellar wind can evacuate all types of grains from HII regions. In the frame of our chemo-dynamical model we vary parameters of the stellar wind and illustrate their influence on the morphology and synthetic infrared images of the bubbles.