Clumpy Ultracompact HII Regions I: Fully Supersonic Wind-blown Models

Abstract

We propose that a significant fraction of the ultracompact HII regions found in massive star-forming clouds are the result of the interaction of the wind and ionizing radiation from a young massive star with the clumpy molecular cloud gas in its neighbourhood. Distributed mass loading in the flow allows the compact nebulae to be long-lived. In this paper, we discuss a particularly simple case, in which the flow in the HII region is everywhere supersonic. The line profiles predicted for this model are highly characteristic, for the case of uniform mass loading. We discuss briefly other observational diagnostics of these models.Comment: To appear in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 5 pages LaTeX (uses mn.sty and epsf.sty macros) + 4 PS figures. Also available via http://axp2.ast.man.ac.uk:8000/Preprints.htm