A New Look at the Molecular Gas in M42 and M43: Possible Evidence for Cloud-Cloud Collision that Triggered Formation of the OB Stars in the Orion Nebula Cluster

The Orion Nebula Cluster toward the H ii region M42 is the most outstanding young cluster at the smallest distance (410 pc) among the rich high-mass stellar clusters. By newly analyzing the archival molecular data of the 12CO(J = 1-0) emission at 21″ resolution, we identified at least three pairs of complementary distributions between two velocity components at 8 and 13 km s−1. We present a hypothesis that the two clouds collided with each other and triggered formation of the high-mass stars, mainly toward two regions including the nearly 10 O stars in M42 and the B star, NU Ori, in M43. The timescale of the collision is estimated to be ∼0.1 Myr by a ratio of the cloud size and velocity corrected for projection, which is consistent with the age of the youngest cluster members less than 0.1 Myr. The majority of the low-mass cluster members were formed prior to the collision in the last Myr. We discuss the implications of the present hypothesis and the scenario of high-mass star formation by comparing with the other eight cases of triggered O-star formation via cloud-cloud collision.