Are molecular outflows around high-mass stars driven by ionization feedback?

Abstract

The formation of massive stars exceeding 10 M sun usually results in large-scale molecular outflows. Numerical simulations, including ionization, of the formation of such stars show evidence for ionization-driven molecular outflows. Here we examine whether the outflows seen in these models reproduce the observations. We compute synthetic ALMA and CARMA maps of CO emission lines of the outflows, and compare their signatures to existing single-dish and interferometric data. We find that the ionization-driven models can only reproduce weak outflows around high-mass star-forming regions. We argue that expanding H II regions probably do not represent the dominant mechanism for driving observed outflows. We suggest instead that observed outflows are driven by the collective action of the outflows from the many lower-mass stars that inevitably form around young massive stars in a cluster.