With a metallicity of 12 + Log(O/H) $approx$ 7.1-7.2, I Zw 18 is a canonical low-metallicity blue compact dwarf (BCD) galaxy. A growing number of BCDs, including I Zw 18, have been found to host strong, narrow-lined, nebular He II ($lambda$4686) emis
sion with enhanced intensities compared to H$beta$ (e.g., He II($lambda$4686)/H$beta$ > 1%). We present new observations of I Zw 18 using the Keck Cosmic Web Imager. These observations reveal two nebular He II emission regions (or He III regions) northwest and southeast of the He III region in the galaxys main body investigated in previous studies. All regions exhibit He II($lambda4686$)/Hbeta greater than 2%. The two newly resolved He III regions lie along an axis that intercepts the position of I Zw 18s ultraluminous X-ray (ULX) source. We explore whether the ULX could power the two He III regions via shock activity and/or beamed X-ray emission. We find no evidence of shocks from the gas kinematics. If the ULX powers the two regions, the X-ray emission would need to be beamed. Another potential explanation is that a class of early-type nitrogen-rich Wolf-Rayet stars with low winds could power the two He III regions, in which case the alignment with the ULX would be coincidental.
We investigate the relationship between the dust-to-metals ratio (D/M) and the local interstellar medium environment at ~2 kpc resolution in five nearby galaxies: IC342, M31, M33, M101, and NGC628. A modified blackbody model with a broken power-law e
missivity is used to model the dust emission from 100 to 500 um observed by Herschel. We utilize the metallicity gradient derived from auroral line measurements in HII regions whenever possible. Both archival and new CO rotational line and HI 21 cm maps are adopted to calculate gas surface density, including new wide field CO and HI maps for IC342 from IRAM and the VLA, respectively. We experiment with several prescriptions of CO-to-H$_2$ conversion factor, and compare the resulting D/M-metallicity and D/M-density correlations, both of which are expected to be non-negative from depletion studies. The D/M is sensitive to the choice of the conversion factor. The conversion factor prescriptions based on metallicity only yield too much molecular gas in the center of IC342 to obtain the expected correlations. Among the prescriptions tested, the one that yields the expected correlations depends on both metallicity and surface density. The 1-$sigma$ range of the derived D/M spans 0.40-0.58. Compared to chemical evolution models, our measurements suggest that the dust growth time scale is much shorter than the dust destruction time scale. The measured D/M is consistent with D/M in galaxy-integrated studies derived from infrared dust emission. Meanwhile, the measured D/M is systematically higher than the D/M derived from absorption, which likely indicates a systematic offset between the two methods.
We examine the three-dimensional structure and dust extinction properties in a ~ 200 pc $times$ 100 pc region in the southwest bar of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). We model a deep Hubble Space Telescope optical color-magnitude diagram (CMD) of re
d clump and red giant branch stars to infer the dust extinction and galactic structure. We model the distance distribution of the stellar component with a Gaussian and find a centroid distance of 65.2 kpc (distance modulus $mu$ = 19.07 mag) with a FWHM $approx$ 11.3 kpc. This large extent along the line of sight reproduces results from previous studies using variable stars and red clump stars. Additionally, we find an offset between the stellar and dust distributions, with the dust on the near side relative to the stars by 3.22 $^{+1.69}_{-1.44}$ kpc, resulting in a 73% reddened fraction of stars. Modeling the dust layer with a log-normal $A_V$ distribution indicates a mean extinction $langle A_V rangle$ = 0.41 $pm$ 0.09 mag. We also calculate $A_V/N_H$ = 3.2 - 4.2 $times10^{-23}$ mag cm$^2$ H$^{-1}$ which is significantly lower than the Milky Way value but is comparable to previous SMC dust-to-gas ratio measurements. Our results yield the first joint dust extinction and 3D geometry properties in a key region in the SMC. This study demonstrates that CMD modeling can be a powerful tool to simultaneously constrain dust extinction and geometry properties in nearby galaxies.
We present an atlas of ultraviolet and infrared images of ~15,750 local (d < 50 Mpc) galaxies, as observed by NASAs WISE and GALEX missions. These maps have matched resolution (FWHM 7.5 and 15), matched astrometry, and a common procedure for backgrou
nd removal. We demonstrate that they agree well with resolved intensity measurements and integrated photometry from previous surveys. This atlas represents the first part of a program (the z=0 Multi-wavelength Galaxy Synthesis) to create a large, uniform database of resolved measurements of gas and dust in nearby galaxies. The images and associated catalogs are publicly available at the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive. This atlas allows us estimate local and integrated star formation rates (SFRs) and stellar masses (M$_star$) across the local galaxy population in a uniform way. In the appendix, we use the population synthesis fits of Salim et al. (2016, 2018) to calibrate integrated M$_star$ and SFR estimators based on GALEX and WISE. Because they leverage an SDSS-base training set of >100,000 galaxies, these calibrations have high precision and allow us to rigorously compare local galaxies to Sloan Digital Sky Survey results. We provide these SFR and M$_star$ estimates for all galaxies in our sample and show that our results yield a main sequence of star forming galaxies comparable to previous work. We also show the distribution of intensities from resolved galaxies in NUV-to-WISE1 vs. WISE1-to-WISE3 space, which captures much of the key physics accessed by these bands.
We use Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations of red clump stars taken as part of the Small Magellanic Cloud Investigation of Dust and Gas Evolution (SMIDGE) program to measure the average dust extinction curve in a ~ 200 pc x 100 pc region in the
southwest bar of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The rich information provided by our 8-band ultra-violet through near-infrared photometry allows us to model the color-magnitude diagram of the red clump accounting for the extinction curve shape, a log-normal distribution of $A_{V}$, and the depth of the stellar distribution along the line of sight. We measure an extinction curve with $R_{475} = A_{475}/(A_{475}-A_{814})$ = 2.65 $pm$ 0.11. This measurement is significantly larger than the equivalent values of published Milky Way $R_{V}$ = 3.1 ($R_{475} = 1.83$) and SMC Bar $R_{V}$ = 2.74 ($R_{475} = 1.86$) extinction curves. Similar extinction curve offsets in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) have been interpreted as the effect of large dust grains. We demonstrate that the line-of-sight depth of the SMC (and LMC) introduces an apparent gray contribution to the extinction curve inferred from the morphology of the red clump. We show that no gray dust component is needed to explain extinction curve measurements when a full-width half-max depth of 10 $pm$ 2 kpc in the stellar distribution of the SMC (5 $pm$ 1 kpc for the LMC) is considered, which agrees with recent studies of Magellanic Cloud stellar structure. The results of our work demonstrate the power of broad-band HST imaging for simultaneously constraining dust and galactic structure outside the Milky Way.
