A spatially resolved study of ionized regions in galaxies at different ...

150 Conclusions and future work
has to be a large reservoir of gas to maintain this star formation rate, something that is
confirmed by the huge Hi concentration in which the region is located.
From the spatial distribution of the stars, we can conclude that the star formation in
NGC 5471 has proceeded in a general spatio-temporal sequence from the halo innwards to
the core, something also seen in 30 Doradus (Walborn and Blades, 1997). The current event
of ionizing clusters is contained within a large bubble, which is likely to have been produced
by the stars that formed ∼ 20 Myr ago. This leads to the general question of if a low density
“seed” generation of evolved intermediate mass stars is in fact a prerequisite to trigger a
starburst event (Brandner, 2002). More data of similar kind are obviously needed in order
to have an answer.
The total oxygen abundances of the four resolved knots analysed spectroscopically (Skillman,
1985; Kennicutt et al., 2003) show a similar value with only one of them showing a
slightly lower oxygen content. No more detailed studies for this region have been yet done.
The recently developed technique of Integral Field Spectroscopy offers the opportunity
to perform a spatially resolved study of the physical conditions of the ionized gas of GEHR
exploring at the same time the properties of their ionizing stellar populations. This has been
done in this work for the giant Hii region complex in NGC 6946 using PPak attached to the
3.5m telescope of the CAHA observatory. The configuration was chosen to cover the whole
spectrum from 3600 up to 10000 Å, allowing the measurement of the [Siii] lines in the near
infrared. This is the first time to our knowledge that data of this kind have been obtained
for such a wide spectral range.
From the created maps, we have selected four main knots, labelled from A to D, to
perform a detailed integrated spectroscopic analysis of these structures and of the whole
PPak field-of-view. For all the knots the density has been found to be very similar and
below 100 cm −3 . The electron temperature of [Oiii] was measured in knots A, B, C and
the integrated PPak-field, and was found to be around 8000 K. The temperatures of [Oii]
and [Siii] were also measured in the four cases. The abundances derived from the ”direct
method” are typical of high metallicity disk Hii regions, and very uniform among all knots,
with a mean value of 8.65. This is comparable to what has been found by other authors
for regions at similar galactocentric distance (Larsen et al., 2006). The S/O and N/O ratios
are very similar in all structures. Therefore, a remarkable abundance uniformity is found
despite the different excitations found throughout the nebula that can be appreciated in the
[Oiii] λ 5007/Hβ, [Nii] λ 6584/Hα and, [Sii] λλ 6717,6731/Hα maps. This uniformity is also
supported by the behaviour of the S 23 parameter which is approximately constant despite the
wide range of excitation observed. This confirms the results found in the classical studies by
Skillman (1985), Diaz et al. (1987), Rosa and Mathis (1987), and more recently in spatially
resolved studies of Hii galaxies (Kehrig et al., 2008; Lagos et al., 2009). On the other hand,
there are stellar populations old enough as to produce supernovae since at least one is
reported to exist in the region (Mayall, 1948). This implies either a very fast and effective