paper

A comprehensive study of reported high metallicity giant HII regions. II. Ionising stellar populations

arXiv:astro-ph/0208229 · doi:10.1046/j.1365-8711.2002.05934.x

Abstract

The ionising stellar populations of eleven HII regions in the spiral galaxies: NGC628, NGC925, NGC1232 and NGC1637, all of them reported to have solar or oversolar abundances according to empirical calibrations, have been analysed using stellar population synthesis models. Four of the observed regions in the sample, show features which indicate the presence of a population of Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars with ages between 2.3 and 4.1 Myr. This population is sufficient to explain the emission line spectrum of the low metallicity region H13 in NGC628. This is not the case for the rest of the regions for which a second ionising population is required to simultaneously reproduce both the WR features and the emission line spectrum. For two of the regions showing WR features, no consistent solution is found, since the population containing WR stars produces a spectral energy distribution which is too hard to explain the emission of the gas. Several solutions are proposed to solve this problem.

34 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS

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