Infall and the Formation of a Massive Star

We present evidence of infall in a circumstellar rotating toroid enshrouding a luminous star in the massive star-forming region G24.78+0.08. Besides being one of the rare direct detections of infall in a young high-mass star, our finding stands unique for the simultaneous presence of three elements in the same massive object: a rotating, collapsing toroid, a bipolar outflow, ejected along the rotation axis, and a hypercompact ionized H II region. The large accretion rate and the existence of a hypercompact H II region confirm that the accretion cannot be spherically symmetric and must occur in a circumstellar disk.