Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Jan 2011
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011aas...21725829k&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #217, #258.29; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 43, 2011
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
How stars form out of dense gas and dust is one of the great remaining mysteries in astronomy. While there are viable theories of Galactic star formation, theories of star formation in environments different from those in the Milky Way, which must encompass everything from dwarf galaxies to luminous and ultra-luminous infrared galaxies, are relatively unconstrained. There is a great need for quantitative information about the physical conditions of the interstellar medium in extragalactic star-forming regions and how star formation might vary with the wide range of environments (metallicity, stellar density, turbulence, magnetic fields, etc.). Studies of young, embedded star-forming regions are particularly important because they give us crucial information on the condition of the interstellar medium in star-forming regions before the massive stars have moved off the main sequence, and thus tell us about the properties of the initial stellar population. However, because these regions are obscured by their natal dust and gas, they are poorly understood. Radio recombination lines provide an important extinction-free probe of obscured star-forming regions, yielding crucial constraints on the density, filling factor, and mass of the thermal gas in star-forming regions and number of ionizing photons present in these regions. Unfortunately, until recently these observations were tremendously difficult due to the limited bandwidth and sensitivity of previous radio interferometers. The Expanded Very Large Array (EVLA) has opened new frontiers of discovery for these powerful, but faint, diagnostic lines. We present the first observations of radio recombination lines in nearby star-forming galaxies with the recently updated Expanded Very Large Array (EVLA). These observations provide important constraints on the the physical properties of the thermal gas in these regions, and thus constraint extragalactic star formation theories.
Balser Dana
Chomiuk Laura
Goss Miller
Johnson Kaj
Kepley Amanda A.
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