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Session 21 - Jets, H-H Objects, and Molecular Outflows.
Display session, Monday, January 15
North Banquet Hall, Convention Center
Bipolar molecular outflows are a basic component of the star formation process. This seems to be true for stars of all masses although it has not yet been well established how massive outflows differ from their low-mass counterparts. We present results from a project to identify bipolar outflows from massive Young Stellar Objects (YSOs) and determine how these compare with low-mass YSO systems. Ten massive star formation regions with high velocity ^12CO(J=1-0) line wings were mapped with the Kitt Peak 12 m telescope using the on-the-fly mapping technique. Four of the regions were shown to have massive bipolar outflows with > 10 M\sun of material in the flow and kinetic energies between 10^45 and 10^46 ergs. These outflows have significantly more mass and energy than outflows from low-mass YSOs. We discuss the properties of these outflows based on our ^12CO(J=1-0) maps and ^13CO(J=1-0) spectra. The remaining six regions that were mapped showed a clumpy distribution with multiple velocity components within the cloud complex. We conclude that high-velocity ^12CO line wings are not unambiguous indicators of molecular outflows in the often crowded and turbulent environment of massive star formation regions.
