H line profiles for a sample of supergiant HII regions

II. Broad, low intensity components

¹ Instituto de Astronomía, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Ensenada, México e-mail: maite@astrosen.unam.mx
² Facultad de Física Teórica y del Cosmos, Universidad de Granada, Spain e-mail: mrelano@ugr.es
³ Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias, La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain e-mail: jeb@iac.es
⁴ Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Spain

Received: 20 October 2005
Accepted: 26 April 2006

Abstract

We analyze the broad, low intensity, high velocity components that are seen in the Hα line profiles for a sample of HII regions. These HII regions are chosen from among the brightest and most isolated in a sample of spiral galaxies for which we have photometric and spectroscopic data: NGC 157, NGC 3631, NGC 6764, NGC 3344, NGC 4321, NGC 5364, NGC 5055, NGC 5985, and NGC 7479. We confirm that the line profiles of most of these bright, giant extragalactic HII regions contain broad kinematic components of low intensity, but high velocity, that we denote as wings. We analyze these components, deriving emission measures, central velocities, and velocity dispersions of the blue and red features, which are similar. We interpret these components as expanding shells within the HII regions and produced by the stellar winds from the ionizing stars. We compare the kinetic energies of these expanding shells with the kinetic energy available from the stellar winds. If we allow for the hypothesis that the brightest HII regions are density bounded, we show that, for these HII regions, the stellar wind mechanism can explain the observed shell kinetic energies.