Yurii Pidopryhora
F. J. Lockman; M. P. Rupen; J. C. Shields
The Ophiuchus Superbubble: Disk-Halo Interaction at Work
The discovery of the Ophiuchus superbubble offers an unprecedented opportunity to study Galactic disk-halo interaction at close range. This huge structure is centered around l ~ 30 deg with its top reaching latitudes > 25 deg; at an estimated distance of about 7 kpc this amounts to 3.4 kpc height. It is detected in both H I and H alpha, with the total mass of about 1 million solar masses in each species. Using 100 m Green Bank Telescope (GBT), we have measured about quarter of a million H I spectra at 9 arcmin angular resolution in and around the bubble. The analysis of the kinematics based on this survey has shown that the top of the structure is lagging behind the Galactic rotation by 27 km/s. Many interesting morphological details were also revealed. At the base of the bubble there are "whiskers" of H I several hundreds of parsecs wide, reaching more than 1 kpc into the halo; their vertical density distribution suggests that they are the bubble walls and have been created by sideways rather than upward motion; they resemble the vertical dust lanes of NGC 891. Most of the H I structures seen in the bubble appear to break into numerous filaments, folds and cloudlets. From a Kompaneets model of an expanding bubble, we estimate that the age of this system is ~30 Myr, in good agreement with the theoretically predicted characteristic age when the shell fragmentation of a superbubble due to the Rayleigh-Taylor and gravitational instabilities becomes significant; this probably explains the irregular look. The same model estimates the total energy content of the superbubble to be ~10^53 ergs. Two H I clouds from the low-longitude side of the structure were studied at ~30 arcsec resolution with the combination of data obtained using the Very Large Array (VLA) in C and D configurations, with the GBT providing the zero-spacing flux. Their physical properties and morphology seem to confirm that they are parts of a disrupted superbubble envelope.