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Published July 20, 2013 | Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

The Paα Luminosity Function of H II Regions in Nearby Galaxies from HST/NICMOS

Abstract

The H II region luminosity function (LF) is an important tool for deriving the birthrates and mass distribution of OB associations and is an excellent tracer of the newly formed massive stars and associations. To date, extensive work (predominantly in Hα) has been done from the ground, which is hindered by dust extinction and the severe blending of adjacent (spatially or in projection) H II regions. Reliably measuring the properties of H II regions requires a linear resolution <40 pc, but analyses satisfying this requirement have been done only in a handful of galaxies, so far. As the first space-based work using a galaxy sample, we have selected 12 galaxies from our HST/NICMOS Paα survey and studied the LF and size distribution of H II regions both in individual galaxies and cumulatively, using a virtually extinction-free tracer of the ionizing photon rate. The high angular resolution and low sensitivity to diffuse emission of NICMOS also offer an advantage over ground-based imaging by enabling a higher degree of de-blending of the H II regions. We do not confirm the broken power-law LFs found in ground-based studies. Instead, we find that the LFs, both individual and co-added, follow a single power law dN(L)/dln L ∝ L^–1, are consistent with the mass function of star clusters in nearby galaxies, and are in agreement with the results of the existing analyses with Hubble Space Telescope (HST) data. The individual and co-added size distributions of H II regions are both roughly consistent with dN(D)/dln D ∝ D^–3, but the power-law scaling is probably contaminated by blended regions or complexes.

Additional Information

© 2013 American Astronomical Society. Received 2013 April 9; accepted 2013 May 21; published 2013 July 2. We thank the anonymous referee for a careful reading of the manuscript. Partial support for program GO-11080 was provided by NASA through a grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-26555. This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED), which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. We also acknowledge the usage of the HyperLeda database (http://leda.univ-lyon1.fr). Facility: HST (NICMOS). Based on observations taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope obtained at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by AURA, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555. These observations are associated with program GO-11080.

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Submitted - 1305.6317v1.pdf

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Created:
August 22, 2023
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October 24, 2023