Compact HII Regions as Clocks of Massive-Star Formation: Evidence for Long Formation Timescales

Abstract

We revisit the luminosity function (LF) of compact HII regions in the context of the inertial--inflow model (IIM), in which massive stars assemble over extended, mass-dependent timescales. The comparison of the compact-HII-region LF with that of OB stars has been used to estimate the compact-HII-phase lifetime and is often cited as evidence for the classical ``lifetime problem'' of HII regions. We show that once stellar growth during the ionizing phase is included, the LF comparison instead constrains massive-star formation timescales, so the lifetime problem turns into evidence for prolonged growth. We illustrate the principle with a simple analytic model, derive revised Galactic LFs for compact HII regions and OB stars from the Red MSX Source survey and the Alma Luminous Star catalogue, and fit the LFs jointly with a deterministic forward model based on stellar evolutionary tracks. The joint LF constraints imply a growth law in which the formation time is about 4 Myr for a $60\,M_\odot$ star, with an approximately square-root dependence on mass, as predicted by the IIM and supported by the numerical simulations from which it was derived. They also require the field stellar initial mass function to be a broken power law, with a slope close to Salpeter's at low masses and significantly steeper above approximately $18\,M_\odot$, as expected from the model prediction that the maximum stellar mass scales with the mass of the parent cloud. We conclude that massive stars in the Milky Way form over Myr timescales that increase with their final mass.