Evolution of HII regions in hierarchically structured molecular clouds

Abstract

We present observations of the H91$α$ recombination line emission towards a sample of nine HII regions associated with 6.7-GHz methanol masers, and report arcsecond-scale emission around compact cores. We derive physical parameters for our sources, and find that although simple hydrostatic models of region evolution reproduce the observed region sizes, they significantly underestimate emission measures. We argue that these findings are consistent with young source ages in our sample, and can be explained by existence of density gradients in the ionised gas.