Issue |
A&A
Volume 592, August 2016
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | A47 | |
Number of page(s) | 10 | |
Section | Interstellar and circumstellar matter | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201527819 | |
Published online | 20 July 2016 |
Constraining the escape fraction of ionizing photons from H ii regions within NGC 300: A concept paper⋆,⋆⋆
1 Space Telescope Science Institute, 3700 San Martin Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA
e-mail: fniederhofer@stsci.edu
2 Universitäts-Sternwarte München, Scheinerstraße 1, 81679 München, Germany
3 Excellence Cluster Origin and Structure of the Universe, Boltzmannstr. 2, 85748 Garching bei München, Germany
4 European Southern Observatory, Karl-Schwarzschild-Straße 2, 85748 Garching bei München, Germany
5 Astrophysics Research Institute, Liverpool John Moores University, 146 Brownlow Hill, Liverpool L3 5RF, UK
Received: 24 November 2015
Accepted: 31 May 2016
Using broadband photometry from the Hubble Space Telescope in combination with Very Large Telescope narrowband Hα observations of the nearby spiral galaxy NGC 300, we explore a method for estimating the escape fractions of hydrogen-ionizing photons from H ii regions within this galaxy. Our goal in this concept study is to evaluate the spectral types of the most massive stars using the broadband data and estimating their ionizing photon output with the help of stellar atmosphere models. A comparison with the Hα flux that gives the amount of ionized gas in the H ii region provides a measure of the escape fraction of ionizing photons from that region. We performed some tests with a number of synthetic young clusters with varying parameters to assess the reliability of the method. However, we found that the derived stellar spectral types and consequently the expected ionizing photon luminosity of a region is highly uncertain. The tests also show that on one hand we tended to overestimate the integrated photon output of a region for young ages and low numbers of stars, and on the other hand we mostly underestimated the combined ionizing luminosity for a large stellar number and older cluster ages. We conclude that the proposed method of using stellar broadband photometry to infer the leakage of ionizing photons from H ii regions is highly uncertain and dominated by the errors of the resulting stellar spectral types. Therefore this method is not suitable. Stellar spectra are needed to reliably determine the stellar types and escape fractions. Studies to this end have been carried out for the Magellanic Clouds.
Key words: stars: massive / HII regions / galaxies: individual: NGC 300 / galaxies: ISM
Based on observations made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, and obtained from the Hubble Legacy Archive, which is a collaboration between the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI/NASA), the Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility (ST-ECF/ESA) and the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre (CADC/NRC/CSA).
© ESO, 2016
Current usage metrics show cumulative count of Article Views (full-text article views including HTML views, PDF and ePub downloads, according to the available data) and Abstracts Views on Vision4Press platform.
Data correspond to usage on the plateform after 2015. The current usage metrics is available 48-96 hours after online publication and is updated daily on week days.
Initial download of the metrics may take a while.