| Issue |
A&A
Volume 696, April 2025
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Article Number | A78 | |
| Number of page(s) | 37 | |
| Section | Extragalactic astronomy | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202450963 | |
| Published online | 04 April 2025 | |
A Virgo Environmental Survey Tracing Ionised Gas Emission (VESTIGE)
XVII. Statistical properties of individual H II regions in unperturbed systems⋆
1
Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS, CNES, LAM, Marseille, France
2
Universitá di Milano-Bicocca, piazza della scienza 3, 20100 Milano, Italy
3
INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera, Via Brera 28, 20121 Milano, Italy
4
Université Côte d’Azur, Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, CNRS, Laboratoire Lagrange, 06000 Nice, France
5
Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux, Univ. Bordeaux, CNRS, B18N, allée Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, 33615 Pessac, France
6
National Research Council of Canada, Herzberg Astronomy and Astrophysics, 5071 West Saanich Road, Victoria, BC V9E 2E7, Canada
7
AIM, CEA, CNRS, Université Paris-Saclay, Université Paris Diderot, Sorbonne Paris Cité, Observatoire de Paris, PSL University, F-91191 Gif-sur-Yvette Cedex, France
8
Department of Astrophysics, University of Vienna, Türkenschanzstrasse 17, 1180 Vienna, Austria
9
INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera, Via Brera 28, 20121 Milano, Italy
10
Institut Universitaire de France, 1 rue Descartes, 75005 Paris, France
⋆⋆ Corresponding author; alessandro.boselli@lam.fr
Received:
2
June
2024
Accepted:
14
February
2025
The Virgo Environmental Survey Tracing Ionised Gas Emission (VESTIGE) survey is a blind narrow-band Hα + [N II] imaging survey of the Virgo cluster carried out with MegaCam of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. The survey provides deep narrow-band images for 385 galaxies hosting star-forming H II regions. We identify individual H II regions and measure their main physical properties such as Hα luminosity, equivalent diameter, and electron density with the purpose of deriving standard relations that can serve as a reference for future local and high-z studies of H II regions in star-forming systems in different environments. For this purpose, we used a complete sample of ≃13.000 H II regions of luminosity L(Hα)≥1037 erg s−1 in order to derive the main statistical properties of H II regions in unperturbed systems, which are identified as those galaxies with a normal H I gas content, and are in total 64 objects. These are the composite Hα luminosity function, equivalent diameter and electron density distribution, and luminosity-size relation. We also derived the main scaling relations between several parameters representative of the H II regions (total number, luminosity of the first ranked regions, fraction of the diffuse component, best-fit parameters of the Schechter luminosity function measured for individual galaxies) and those characterising the properties of the host galaxies (stellar mass, star formation rate and specific star formation rate, stellar mass and star formation rate surface density, metallicity, molecular-to-atomic gas ratio, total gas-to-dust mass ratio). We briefly discuss the results of this analysis and their implications in the study of the star formation process in galaxy discs.
Key words: galaxies: star formation
Based on observations obtained with MegaPrime/MegaCam, a joint project of CFHT and CEA/DAPNIA, at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) which is operated by the National Research Council (NRC) of Canada, the Institut National des Sciences de l’Univers of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) of France and the University of Hawaii.
© The Authors 2025
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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