The young stellar population of NGC 4214 as observed with HST. II. Results

Abstract

We present the results of a detailed UV-optical study of the nearby dwarf starburst galaxy NGC 4214 using multifilter HST/WFPC2+STIS photometry. The stellar extinction is found to be quite patchy, with some areas having values of E(4405-5495)< 0.1 mag and others, associated with star forming regions, much more heavily obscured, a result which is consistent with previous studies of the nebular extinction. We determined the ratio of blue-to-red supergiants and found it to be consistent with theoretical models for the metallicity of the SMC. The stellar IMF of the field in the range 20-100 solar masses is found to be steeper than Salpeter. A number of massive clusters and associations with ages between a few and 200 million years are detected and their properties are discussed.

49 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables

References in corpus (1)

• The young stellar population of NGC 4214 as observed with HST. I. Data and methods

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Diverging UV and Halpha fluxes of star forming galaxies predicted by the IGIMF theory
• Biases on initial mass function determinations. III. Cluster masses derived from unresolved photometry
• The young stellar population of NGC 4214 as observed with HST. I. Data and methods