Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
1998-01-15
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
20 pages, postscript, 6 figures. Uses knawproc.cls style file. To appear in the proceedings of the conference `The Most Distan
Scientific paper
Starbursts are important because they can serve as local analogs of the processes that were important in the origin and early evolution of galaxies and in the heating and chemical enrichment of the inter-galactic medium. They may also play an important role in the AGN phenomenon. In this contribution I review the use of UV spectroscopic diagnostics that can be `calibrated' at low-redshift and then applied at high redshift. From the analysis of the UV properties of local starbursts we have learned: 1) dust dramatically affects our view of high-mass star-formation 2) more metal-rich starbursts are redder and more heavily extincted in the UV, more luminous, have stronger vacuum- UV absorption-lines, and occur in more massive and optically-brighter host galaxies 3) the strong interstellar absorption-lines directly reflect the hydrodynamical consequences of the starburst. These results suggest that the high-redshift `Lyman Drop-Out' galaxies are are typically highly extincted by dust (average factor of 5 to 10), may have moderately high metallicities (0.1 to 1 times solar?), are probably building galaxies with stellar surface-mass-densities similar to present-day ellipticals, and may be suffering substantial losses of metal-enriched gas that can `pollute' the inter-galactic medium. I also discuss UV observations of the nuclei of type 2 Seyfert galaxies. These show that compact (100-pc-scale) heavily-reddened starbursts are the source of most of the `featureless continuum' in UV-bright Seyfert 2 nuclei, and are an energetically significant component in these objects.
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