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Register a new userIonized Gas Kinematics at High Resolution V: [NeII], Multiple Clusters, High Efficiency Star Formation and Blue Flows in He 2-10
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We measured the $12.8mu$m [NeII] line in the dwarf starburst galaxy He 2-10 with the high-resolution spectrometer TeXeS on the NASA IRTF. The data cube has diffraction-limited spatial resolution $sim1^{primeprime}$ and total velocity resolution including thermal broadening of $sim5$km/s. This makes it possible to compare the kinematics of individual star-forming clumps and molecular clouds in the three dimensions of space and velocity, and allows us to determine star formation efficiencies. The kinematics of the ionized gas confirm that the starburst contains multiple dense clusters. From the $M/R$ of the clusters and the $simeq30-40$% star formation efficiencies the clusters are likely to be bound and long lived, like globulars. Non-gravitational features in the line profiles show how the ionized gas flows through the ambient molecular material, as well as a narrow velocity feature which we identify with the interface of the HII region and a cold dense clump. These data offer an unprecedented view of the interaction of embedded HII regions with their environment.
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NGC 4194 is a post-merger starburst known as The Medusa for its striking tidal features. We present here a detailed study of the structure and kinematics of ionized gas in the central 0.65 kpc of the Medusa. The data include radio continuum maps with resolution up to $0.18arcsec$ (35 pc) and a $12.8mu$m [NeII] data cube with spectral resolution $sim4$kms: the first {it high resolution, extinction-free} observations of this remarkable object. The ionized gas has the kinematic signature of a core in solid-body rotation. The starburst has formed a complex of bright compact HII~regions, probably excited by deeply embedded super star clusters, but none of these sources is a convincing candidate for a galactic nucleus. The nuclei of the merger partners that created the Medusa have not yet been identified.
The nearby dwarf starburst galaxy NGC 5253 hosts a deeply embedded radio-infrared supernebula excited by thousands of O stars. We have observed this source in the 10.5{mu}m line of S+3 at 3.8 kms-1 spectral and 1.4 spatial resolution, using the high resolution spectrometer TEXES on the IRTF. The line profile cannot be fit well by a single Gaussian. The best simple fit describes the gas with two Gaussians, one near the galactic velocity with FWHM 33.6 km s-1 and another of similiar strength and FWHM 94 km s-1 centered sim20 km s-1 to the blue. This suggests a model for the supernebula in which gas flows towards us out of the molecular cloud, as in a blister or champagne flow or in the HII regions modelled by Zhu (2006).
The nearby dwarf galaxy II Zw 40 hosts an intense starburst. At the center of the starburst is a bright compact radio and infrared source, thought to be a giant dense HII region containing ~14,000 O stars. Radio continuum images suggest that the compact source is actually a collection of several smaller emission regions. We accordingly use the kinematics of the ionized gas to probe the structure of the radio-infrared emission region. With TEXES on the NASA-IRTF we measured the 10.5um [SIV] emission line with effective spectral resolutions, including thermal broadening, of ~25 and ~3 km/s and spatial resolution ~1. The line profile shows two distinct, spatially coextensive, emission features. The stronger feature is at galactic velocity and has FWHM 47 km/s. The second feature is ~44km/s redward of the first and has FWHM 32 km/s. We argue that these are two giant embedded clusters, and estimate their masses to be ~3x10^5Mo and ~1.5x10^5 Mo. The velocity shift is unexpectedly large for such a small spatial offset. We suggest that it may arise in a previously undetected kinematic feature remaining from the violent merger that formed the galaxy.
We have used integral field spectroscopy of a sample of six nearby (z~0.01-0.04) high star-formation rate (SFR~10-40 solar masses per year) galaxies to investigate the relationship between local velocity dispersion and star formation rate on sub-galactic scales. The low redshift mitigates, to some extent, the effect of beam smearing which artificially inflates the measured dispersion as it combines regions with different line-of-sight velocities into a single spatial pixel. We compare the parametric maps of the velocity dispersion with the Halpha flux (a proxy for local star-formation rate), and the velocity gradient (a proxy for the local effect of beam smearing). We find, even for these very nearby galaxies, the Halpha velocity dispersion correlates more strongly with velocity gradient than with Halpha flux - implying that beam smearing is still having a significant effect on the velocity dispersion measurements. We obtain a first-order non parametric correction for the unweighted and flux weighted mean velocity dispersion by fitting a 2D linear regression model to the spaxel-by-spaxel data where the velocity gradient and the Halpha flux are the independent variables and the velocity dispersion is the dependent variable; and then extrapolating to zero velocity gradient. The corrected velocity dispersions are a factor of ~1.3-4.5 and ~1.3-2.7 lower than the uncorrected flux-weighted and unweighted mean line-of-sight velocity dispersion values, respectively. These corrections are larger than has been previously cited using disc models of the velocity and velocity dispersion field to correct for beam smearing. The corrected flux-weighted velocity dispersion values are sigma_m~20-50 km/s.
On average molecular clouds convert only a small fraction epsilon_ff of their mass into stars per free-fall time, but differing star formation theories make contrasting claims for how this low mean efficiency is achieved. To test these theories, we need precise measurements of both the mean value and the scatter of epsilon_ff, but high-precision measurements have been difficult because they require determining cloud volume densities, from which we can calculate free-fall times. Until recently, most density estimates assume clouds as uniform spheres, while their real structures are often filamentary and highly non-uniform, yielding systematic errors in epsilon_ff estimates and smearing real cloud-to-cloud variations. We recently developed a theoretical model to reduce this error by using column density distributions in clouds to produce more accurate volume density estimates. In this letter, we apply this model to recent observations of 12 nearby molecular clouds. Compared to earlier analyses, our method reduces the typical dispersion of epsilon_ff within individual clouds from 0.35 dex to 0.31 dex, and decreases the median value of epsilon_ff over all clouds from ~ 0.02 to ~ 0.01. However, we find no significant change in the ~ 0.2 dex cloud-to-cloud dispersion of epsilon_ff, suggesting the measured dispersions reflect real structural differences between clouds.
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