Bibcode
Weilbacher, P. M.; Monreal-Ibero, A.; Verhamme, Anne; Sandin, Christer; Steinmetz, Matthias; Kollatschny, Wolfram; Krajnović, Davor; Kamann, Sebastian; Roth, Martin M.; Erroz-Ferrer, Santiago; Marino, Raffaella Anna; Maseda, Michael V.; Wendt, Martin; Bacon, Roland; Dreizler, Stefan; Richard, Johan; Wisotzki, Lutz
Referencia bibliográfica
Astronomy and Astrophysics, Volume 611, id.A95, 17 pp.
Fecha de publicación:
4
2018
Revista
Número de citas
49
Número de citas referidas
44
Descripción
The Antennae galaxy (NGC 4038/39) is the closest major interacting
galaxy system and is therefore often studied as a merger prototype. We
present the first comprehensive integral field spectroscopic dataset of
this system, observed with the MUSE instrument at the ESO VLT. We cover
the two regions in this system which exhibit recent star formation: the
central galaxy interaction and a region near the tip of the southern
tidal tail. In these fields, we detect HII regions and diffuse ionized
gas to unprecedented depth. About 15% of the ionized gas was undetected
by previous observing campaigns. This newly detected faint ionized gas
is visible everywhere around the central merger, and shows filamentary
structure. We estimate diffuse gas fractions of about 60% in the central
field and 10% in the southern region. We are able to show that the
southern region contains a significantly different population of HII
regions, showing fainter luminosities. By comparing HII region
luminosities with the HST catalog of young star clusters in the central
field, we estimate that there is enough Lyman-continuum leakage in the
merger to explain the amount of diffuse ionized gas that we detect. We
compare the Lyman-continuum escape fraction of each HII region against
emission line ratios that are sensitive to the ionization parameter.
While we find no systematic trend between these properties, the most
extreme line ratios seem to be strong indicators of density bounded
ionization. Extrapolating the Lyman-continuum escape fractions to the
southern region, we conclude that simply from the comparison of the
young stellar populations to the ionized gas there is no need to invoke
other ionization mechanisms than Lyman-continuum leaking HII regions for
the diffuse ionized gas in the Antennae.
FITS images and Table of HII regions are available at the CDS via
anonymous ftp to http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr (http://130.79.128.5) or via http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/qcat?J/A+A/611/A95
and at http://muse-vlt.eu/science/antennae/
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