Chandra's X-ray View of Massive Star-forming Regions
Leisa Townsley (Penn State University)
Chandra is providing remarkable new views of massive star-forming regions, revealing the effects of massive stars on their surroundings. We will explore the latest data on several such regions, highlighting physical processes that characterize the life of a massive stellar cluster, from deeply-embedded cores too young to have established an HII region to superbubbles so large that they shape our views of galaxies. X-ray observations reveal hundreds of pre-main sequence stars accompanying the massive stars that power these great HII region complexes; this X-ray selected sample of young stars can be used to study disk frequency and evolution in the proximity of massive stars. The most massive stars themselves are often anomalously hard X-ray emitters; this may be a new indicator of close binarity. These complexes are sometimes suffused by diffuse X-ray structures, signatures of multi-million-degree plasmas created by fast O-star winds. In older regions we see the X-ray remains of the deaths of massive stars that stayed close to their birthplaces, exploding as cavity supernovae within the superbubbles that these clusters created.