HII regions and star formation in the galactic center

Abstract

The centimeter wavelength continuum radiation seen toward the Galactic center (Figure 1) is a mixture of thermal (free-free) and nonthermal (synchrotron) radiation which originates in the nucleus and along the line-of-sight. In this review we discuss only the thermal emission (also see Mezger 1974 and Oort 1977). High-frequency radio continuum and recombination line observations show that the thermal radiation comes from extend, low-density (ELD) HII, and a number of giant “radio HII regions” (see Mezger 1978 for definitions). The approximate half-power contour of the ELD HII (labelled EI in Fig. 1), probably represents a superposition of evolved and expanded HII regions. Thermal radiation outside EI comes predominantly from along the line-of-sight (see Pauls and Mezger 1975).