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Distribution of very young stellar clusters in grand-design spirals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 January 2010

Preben Grosbøl
Affiliation:
European Southern Observatory, Garching, Germany
Horacio Dottori
Affiliation:
Instituto de Física, Porto Alegre, Brazil
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Abstract

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Many grand-design spiral galaxies display strings of knots along their arms on K-band images. Near-infrared (NIR) spectra and broad-band colours of such knots have identified them as very young, massive stellar complexes. The low absorption in the NIR makes it possible to derive complete statistics of such complexes and thereby estimate the associated star-formation rate. We have obtained deep NIR maps of eight grand-design spirals using VLT/HAWK-I and identified massive complexes with ages of < 10 Myr using NIR colour–colour diagrams. The youngest, most massive complexes are well-aligned and concentrated in the arm regions of the grand-design galaxies with strong spiral perturbations. Their absolute magnitudes have a bright tail reaching almost MK = −16 mag. Both the fraction of young to old sources and the ratio of diffuse to more compact objects suggest a dependence on the strength of the spiral pattern in the host galaxy.

Type
Contributed Papers
Copyright
Copyright © International Astronomical Union 2010