INFRARED POLARIMETRY AND IMAGING OF ULTRACOMPACT PARTIALLY-IONIZED OPTICAL SOURCES IN THE ORION NEBULA

Space Telescope images of the Orion nebula taken with the Wide-Field C amera have revealed subarcsecond structure in several dozen objects wh ich are apparently ionized externally from nearby stars. We have obtai ned near-fit images and IR polarimetry of the Orion region to search f or correlations with the WFC objects. We find that all of the ultracom pact WFC objects are associated with IR features of some sort, and tha t some are associated with strongly polarized IR emission. The object with strongest polarization also shows small IR ''lobes''. In addition , we find some previously unreported sources, showing polarized fit em ission, outside the field of the HST images, which we believe may be t he same sorts of object. We note that the object with strongest polari zation has a double-lobed appearance in the K band image.