8 research outputs found
PV Ceph: Young Star Caught Speeding?
Three independent lines of evidence imply that the young star PV Ceph is
moving at roughly 20 km/s through the interstellar medium. The first, and
strongest, suggestion of motion comes from the geometry of the HH knots in the
"giant" Herbig-Haro (HH) flow associated with PV Ceph. Bisectors of lines drawn
between pairs of knots at nearly equal distances from PV Ceph imply an E-W
motion of the source, and a plasmon model fit to the knot positions gives a
good fit of 22 km/s motion for the star. The second bit of damning evidence
comes from a redshifted "trail" of molecular gas, pointing in the same E-W
direction implied by the HH knot geometry. The third exhibit we offer in
accusing PV Ceph of speeding involves the tilt apparent in the high-velocity
molecular jet now emanating from the star. This tilt is best explained if the
true, current, jet direction is N-S, as it is in HST images, and the star is
moving at roughly 20 km/s. Tracing the motion of PV Ceph backward in time, to
the nearest cluster from which it might have been ejected, we find that it is
very likely to have been thrown out of the massive star-forming cluster NGC
7023 (more than 10 pc away). We propose that PV Ceph was ejected, at a speed
large enough to escape NGC 7023, at least 100,000 years ago, but that it did
not enter the molecular cloud in which it now finds itself until more like
35,000 years ago. Our calculations show that the currently-observable molecular
outflow associated with PV Ceph is about 10,000 years old, so that the flow has
had plenty of time to form while in its current molecular cloud. But, the
question of what PV Ceph was doing, and what gas/disk it took along with it in
the time it was traveling through the low-density region between NGC 7023 and
its current home is an open question.Comment: To be published by the Astrophysical Journal. Figures 1, 6, and 7 are
in gif format. See material from the AAS press conference related to this
work at: http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~agoodman/Presentations/aas04PVCeph