UNDERSTANDING SPATIAL AND SPECTRAL MORPHOLOGIES OF ULTRACOMPACT H ii REGIONS

The spatial morphology, spectral characteristics, and time variability of ultracompact (UC) H ii regions provide strong constraints on the process of massive star formation. We have performed simulations of the gravitational collapse of rotating molecular cloud cores, including treatments of the propagation of ionizing and non-ionizing radiation. We here present synthetic radio continuum observations of H ii regions from our collapse simulations, to investigate how well they agree with observation, and what we can learn about how massive star formation proceeds. We find that intermittent shielding by dense filaments in the gravitationally unstable accretion flow around the massive star leads to highly variable H ii regions that do not grow monotonically, but rather flicker, growing and shrinking repeatedly. This behavior appears to be able to resolve the well-known lifetime problem. We find that multiple ionizing sources generally form, resulting in groups of UC H ii regions, consistent with observations. We confirm that our model reproduces the qualitative H ii region morphologies found in surveys, with generally consistent relative frequencies. We also find that simulated spectral energy distributions (SEDs) from our model are consistent with the range of observed H ii region SEDs, including both regions showing a normal transition from optically thick to optically thin emission, and those with intermediate spectral slopes. In our models, anomalous slopes are solely produced by inhomogeneities in the H ii region, with no contribution from dust emission at millimeter or submillimeter wavelengths. We conclude that many observed characteristics of UC H ii regions appear consistent with massive star formation in fast, gravitationally unstable, accretion flows.