Ionized Gas in Cygnus X

Riley Owens* and Loren Anderson
Center for Gravitational Waves and Cosmology, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506

Presentation No.: 108

Assigned Category (Presentation Format): Physical Sciences (Poster Presentations)

Student’s Major: Astrophysics, Physics

Massive stars emit large amounts of hard ultraviolet radiation which ionizes their surrounding environment. The interplay between these stars and their locale is important in understanding galactic evolution, but poorly understood at small, individual scales. To help inform these gaps in our knowledge, we present radio observations from Cygnus X, a nearby, highly-active nebula riddled with massive stars and surrounding regions of ionized gas. Because of its proximity and the large size of many of its ionized regions, it offers observations of the morphology and dynamics of these environments in excellent angular resolution. We characterize these environments using recombination emission observations from a large (∼60 hours) survey from the Green Bank Telescope, supplemented by past radio surveys. In particular, we use GaussPy+, a Python machine learning algorithm for fitting Gaussian emission features, to decompose hundreds of thousands of spectra to identify key features such as emission intensity, velocity dispersion, and bulk velocity of the ionized gas on a fine scale.

Funding: NSF Award #1950617

Program/mechanism supporting research/creative efforts: the WVU Astrophysics REU (Loren Anderson)