Progresses and methods in research of infrared dust bubble

Abstract

The infrared dust bubble, with ringlike shell, was found by the infrared survey of Galactic plane. Massive stars (OB-type stars) within bubble strongly influence their surrounding environment, throughout their lifetime via stellar wind, ionizing radiation, heating of dust, and expansion of their HII regions. The expansion of HII regions may trigger new generation star formation by compressing neighboring pre-existing molecular material to the point of gravitational instability. Many studies have been focusing on the relationship between the infrared dust bubble and star formation, because there are lots of star formation signatures on borders of bubbles. Previous works have well studied the environment of many bubbles using infrared and radio data from different telescopes. However, there are many problems about the observational research and theoretical model, such as how to make sure the distance scale of the bubble from the Sun, how to find reliable exciting stars and young stars, why not observed the front and rear cloud of the three-dimensional bubble, how to know the ages of different objects and processes around bubbles more exactly, how to further understand the interaction between HII region and ringlike shell.