Using the OSIRIS tunable narrow band imager on the 10.4m GTC (La Palma) we have mapped the SAB(rs)cd galaxy NGC 6946 over a 7.3x7.5 square arcminutes field in the emission lines of the [SII]\lambda\lambda, 6717, 6731 doublet, and in H\alpha. From these maps we have produced catalogs of the H\alpha luminosities and effective radii of 557 HII regions across the disk, and derived the [SII] emission line ratios of 370 of these. The H\alpha observations were used to derive the mean luminosity-weighted electron densities for the regions of the sample, while the [SII] line ratios allowed us to derive values of the in situ electron densities in the denser zones from which the major fraction of the radiation in these lines is emitted, for 58 of the regions. This is by far the largest data set of its kind for a single galaxy. A classical two phase model is used to derive the filling factors of the regions. We find that although the mean electron density decreases with the square root of the radius of the regions, the in situ density is essentially independent of this radius. Thus the filling factor falls systematically, as the radius and the luminosity of the regions increases, with a power law of exponent -2.23 between filling factor and radius. These measurements should enhance the perspectives for more refined physical models of HII regions.
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H II regions are ionized nebulae associated with the formation of massive stars. They exhibit a wealth of emission lines in their spectra that form the basis for estimation of chemical composition. The amount of heavy chemical elements is essential to the understanding of important phenomena such as nucleosynthesis, star formation and chemical evolution of galaxies. For over 80 years, however, a discrepancy exists of a factor of around two between heavy-element abundances (the so-called metallicity) derived from the two main kinds of emission lines that can be measured in nebular spectra
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The cosmic evolution of the barred galaxy population provides key information about the secular evolution of galaxies and the settling of rotationally dominated discs. We study the bar fraction in the SMACSJ0723.37323 (SMACS0723) cluster of galaxies at z = 0.39 using the Early Release Observations obtained with the NIRCam instrument mounted on the JWST telescope. We visually inspected all cluster member galaxies using the images from the NIRCam F200W filter. We classified the galaxies into ellipticals and discs and determine the presence of a bar. The cluster member selection was based on a
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In the 90s, the COBE satellite discovered that not all the microwave emission from our Galaxy behaved as expected. Part of this signal was later assigned to a fresh new emission component, spatially correlated with the Galactic dust emission, which showed greater importance in the microwave range of frequencies. It has been named since as “anomalous microwave emission”, or AME. The current main hypothesis to explain the AME origin is that it is emitted by small dust particles which undergo fast spinning movements. In Fernández-Torreiro et al. (2023), we study the observational properties of
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