H II Region

H II region, also called diffuse nebula or emission nebula, interstellar matter consisting of ionized hydrogen atoms. The energy that is responsible for ionizing and heating the hydrogen in an emission nebula comes from a central star that has a surface temperature in excess of 20,000 K. The density of these clouds normally ranges from 10 to 100,000 particles per cubic cm; their temperature is about 8,000 K.

star-forming region in the Orion Nebula

Like molecular clouds, H II regions typically have little regular structure or sharp boundaries. Their sizes and masses vary widely. There is even a faint region of ionized gas around the Sun and other comparatively cool stars, but it cannot be observed from nearby stars with existing instruments.

The largest H II regions (none of which occur in the Milky Way Galaxy) are 500 light-years across and contain at least 100,000 solar masses of ionized gas. These enormous H II regions are powered by clusters of massive hot stars rather than by any single stellar body. A typical H II region within the Galaxy measures about 30 light-years in diameter and has an average density of about 10 atoms per cubic cm. The mass of such a cloud amounts to several hundred solar masses. The only H II region visible to the naked eye is the beautiful Orion Nebula. It is located in the constellation named for the Greek mythological hunter and is seen as the central “star” in Orion’s sword. The entire constellation is enveloped in faint emission nebulosity, powered by several stars in Orion’s belt rather than by the star exciting the much smaller Orion Nebula. The largest H II region in terms of angular size is the Gum Nebula, discovered by Australian astronomer Colin S. Gum. It measures 40° in angular diameter and is mainly ionized by two very hot stars (Zeta Puppis and Gamma Velorum).

High-resolution studies of H II regions reveal one of the surprises that make the study of astrophysics delightful. Instead of the smooth structure that might be expected of a gas, a delicate tracery of luminous filaments can be detected down to the smallest scale that can be resolved. In the Orion Nebula this is about 6 billion km (4 billion miles), or about the radius of the orbit of Pluto around the Sun. Even finer details almost surely exist, and there is evidence from spectra that much of the matter may be gathered into dense condensations, or knots, the rest of the space being comparatively empty. Unrestrained gas would fill a vacuum between the visible filaments in about 200 years, an astronomical instant. The nebular gas must be restrained from expansion by the pressure of million-degree tenuous material between the filaments. Its pressure, however, is comparable to that in the visible “warm” (8,000 K) gas of the H II region. Hence, the density of the hot material is several hundred times lower, which effectively prevents it from being observable except in X-rays. The space throughout the plane of the Milky Way Galaxy is largely filled with this hot component, which is mainly produced and heated by supernovae.

In H II regions, hot gas also arises from the stellar winds of the exciting stars. These winds create a large cavity or bubble in the denser, cooler gas originally surrounding such a star. In the interior of the bubble, the radially flowing stellar wind passes through a transition in which its radial motion is converted into heat. The hot gas then fills most of the cavity (perhaps 90 percent or more) and serves to separate the filaments of the warm, comparatively dense H II region. Within the condensations of visible plasma, there are neutral globules in which the gas is quite cold (about 100 K) but is dense enough (typically, 10,000 atoms per cubic cm) to have about the same pressure as the hot and warm materials. In short, an H II region is much more complicated than its visual radiation would suggest.

H II regions are almost always accompanied by molecular clouds on their borders. The Orion Nebula, for example, is merely a conspicuous ionized region on the nearby face of a much larger dark cloud; the H II region is almost entirely produced by the ionization provided by a single hot star, one of the four bright central stars (the Trapezium) identified by Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens in 1656. The shape of the Orion Nebula appears at visible wavelengths as irregular. However, much of this seeming chaos is spurious, caused by obscuration of dust in dark foreground neutral material rather than by the actual distribution of ionized material. Radio waves can penetrate the dust unhindered, and the radio emission from the ionized gas reveals it to be quite circular in shape and surprisingly symmetrical as seen in projection on the sky. The foreground dark material obscures about half the ionized nebula.

An H II region on the outer edge of a large molecular cloud can induce star formation. For instance, behind the bright Orion Nebula, deeper within the dark cold Orion molecular cloud, new stars are being formed today. At present, none of the new stars is massive and hot enough to produce its own H II region, but presumably some of them eventually will be. When an H II region is produced from cold molecular gas by the formation of a hot star, the temperature is raised from roughly 25 to 8,000 K, and the number of particles per cubic centimetre is almost quadrupled because each H₂ molecule is split into two ions and two electrons. Gas pressure is proportional to the product of the temperature and number of particles per cubic centimetre (regardless of their mass, so electrons are as important as the much heavier ions). Thus, the pressure in an H II region is some 800 times the pressure of the cold gas from which it formed. The excess pressure causes a violent expansion of the gas into the dense cloud. Rapid star formation may occur in the compressed region, producing an expanding group of young stars. Such groups, the so-called O Associations (with O stars) or T Associations (with T Tauri stars), have been observed. The component stars simultaneously generate extremely fast outflows from their atmospheres. These winds create regions of hot, tenuous gas surrounding the association. Eventually the massive stars in the association explode as supernovae, which further disturb the surrounding gas.