Star formation triggered by HII regions in our Galaxy: First results for N49 from the Herschel infrared survey of the Galactic plane

Understand

It has been shown that by means of different physical mechanisms the expansion of HII regions can trigger the formation of new stars of all masses.

• This process may be important to the formation of massive stars but has never been quantified in the Galaxy.
• We use Herschel-PACS and -SPIRE images from the Herschel Infrared survey of the Galactic plane, Hi-GAL, to perform this study.
• We combine the Spitzer-GLIMPSE and -MIPSGAL, radio-continuum and sub-millimeter surveys such as ATLASGAL with Hi-GAL to study Young Stellar Objects (YSOs) observed towards Galactic HII regions.