Accelerated gas flow along Ophiuchus B44 filament: Breaking Position-Position-Velocity degeneracy

Abstract

(Abridged) Stellar feedback from massive stars in the Upper-Sco has been proposed to have reshaped the gas in the nearby Ophiuchus complex. In this framework, feedback organizes the gas into two filament types based on their orientation relative to the source of feedback: radial (R-type) filaments, aligned radially to the massive stars, and tangential (T-type) filaments, which are orthogonal to the feedback direction. A key prediction of this scenario is that gas within R-type filaments should flow longitudinally away from the massive stars. In this paper, we test this scenario by measuring the three-dimensional gas flow inside the potential R-type filament B44, combining the 3D orientation of the filament from Gaia-based 3D dust maps with radial velocities from CO observations. We find that gas flows longitudinally along the B44 filament away from the massive stars in Upper-Sco with both tracers yielding consistent velocity fields. This result confirms B44 is a R-type filament formed by stellar feedback from Sco-Cen with an implied filament assembly timescale of $\sim$3~Myr, well within the age of the Upper-Sco massive stars. Moreover, we find that the gas motion along B44 and away from the massive stars is accelerated with $a\sim$1.8~km/s/Myr ($\sim 6 \times 10^{-11}$~m/s$^2$). This acceleration is compatible with the accelerations recorded along the Sco-Cen cluster chains over the past $\sim$15~Myr, indicating that B44 is likely a present-day, gas-phase counterpart of the same feedback-driven process that produced those stellar sequences. We further find evidence for a shock at the wind-facing head of the filament, with a deprojected flow Mach number of $\sim$2 and a matching density jump. Our findings demonstrate that Gaia 3D dust maps can lift the line-of-sight ambiguity intrinsic to PPV spectral data, enabling direct deprojection of the gas velocity field in coherent filaments.