High-mass star formation in Orion triggered by cloud-cloud collision II,
  Two merging molecular clouds in NGC2024
  We analyzed the NANTEN2 13CO (J=2-1 and 1-0) datasets in NGC 2024. We found
that the cloud consists of two velocity components, whereas the cloud shows
mostly single-peaked CO profiles. The two components are physically connected
to the HII region as evidenced by their close correlation with the dark lanes
and the emission nebulosity. The two components show complementary distribution
with a displacement of 0.4 pc. Such complementary distribution is typical to
colliding clouds discovered in regions of high-mass star formation. We
hypothesize that cloud-cloud collision between the two components triggered the
formation of the late O stars and early B stars localized within 0.3 pc of the
cloud peak. The collision timescale is estimated to be ~ 10^5 yrs from a ratio
of the displacement and the relative velocity 3-4 km s-1 corrected for probable
projection. The high column density of the colliding cloud 1023 cm-2 is similar
to those in the other massive star clusters in RCW 38, Westerlund 2, NGC 3603,
and M42, which are likely formed under trigger by cloud-cloud collision. The
present results provide an additional piece of evidence favorable to high-mass
star formation by a major cloud-cloud collision in Orion.
