1. Introduction 2. Observations
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THE ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL, 498:278È292, 1998 May 1 ( 1998. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved. Printed in U.S.A. STELLAR CONTENT OF THE GALACTIC STARBURST TEMPLATE NGC 3603 FROM ADAPTIVE OPTICS OBSERVATIONS1 F.EISENHAUER,2 A.QUIRRENBACH,2 H. ZINNECKER,3 AND R. GENZEL2 Received 1997 October 1; accepted 1997 December 12 ABSTRACT We present near-infrared adaptive optics imaging of the Galactic starburst template NGC 3603 and its stellar center HD 97950. There is clear evidence for the presence of stars down to 1M_ or less. No cuto† or turnover in the initial mass function is evident. Applying theoretical models of the preÈmain- sequence evolution of intermediate-mass stars to the observed color-color diagram, the color-magnitude diagram, and the luminosity function, we constrain both the age distribution and the initial mass func- tion. Within the systematic errors, this initial mass function follows a Salpeter power law with index ! ¹ [0.73 down to the observational limit of less than 1M_. The stars with less than 4M_ appear to be younger than 106 yr, in contrast to previous age determinations of the high-mass content of HD 97950. Subject headings: Hertzsprung-Russell diagram È H II regions È ISM: individual (NGC 3603) È stars: formation È stars: luminosity function, mass function 1. INTRODUCTION low-mass stars(Zinnecker, McCaughrean, & Wilking 1993), even down to preÈmain-sequence (PMS) objects near the Apart from W49, the H II region NGC 3603 is the most hydrogen burning limit(Hillenbrand 1997). On the other massive giant H II region in our Galaxy(Goss & Radhak- hand, the jury is still out on the R136 cluster in the 30 rishnan1969). It is located in the Carina spiral arm at a Doradus H II region, which is an order of magnitude more distance of 7.2 kpc (1A + 0.035 pc). A cluster of about 50 O luminous than the NGC 3603 cluster. Knowing the PMS stars dominated by the Trapezium-like system HD 97950 low-mass population in the Orion Nebula cluster, NGC provides the ionizing radiation (Clayton 1986; Melnick, 3603, and R136, with roughly one, 10, and 100 massive O Tapia, & Terlevich1989; Mo†at 1983). The age of the NGC stars, respectively, will go a long way to helping us under- 3603 cluster has been estimated to be 2È3 Myr(Melnick et stand whether the presence of an increasing number of al.1989). With three Wolf-Rayet (W-R) star candidates and massive stars somehow quenches the formation of low-mass six O3 stars in a volume less than a cubic light-year (Drissen stars. If so, and only if this is so, the concept of bimodal star et al.1995), the central core of NGC 3603 is the densest formation(Gu sten & Mezger 1982; Larson 1986) has a system of high-mass stars known in the Galaxy. Its total quantitative basis beyond speculation. bolometric luminosity is on the order of 107 L _. NGC 3603 thus can be considered as a template for a massive cluster of 2. OBSERVATIONS young stars typical for the building blocks of starbursts in external galaxies. Although its population of high-mass All observations were carried out with the European stars is fairly well known from Hubble Space Telescope Southern Observatory (ESO) adaptive optics (AO) system (HST ) imaging(Mo†at, Drissen, & Shara 1994) and ADONIS at the 3.6 m telescope at La Silla, Chile, and the speckle-masking observations(Hofmann, Seggewiss, & dedicated near-infrared camera SHARP II(R. Hofmann et Weigelt1995), not much is yet known about intermediate- al.1995), developed at the Max-Planck-Institut fu r extra- and low-mass stars. terrestrische Physik, Germany. ADONIS provides a real- Since it is the closest analog in the Galaxy to a starburst, time correction of the atmospheric wave-front distortions, however, its low-mass stellar content is also of considerable and, in the best cases, the di†raction from the telescope interest. This is because there is observational (e.g., Rieke et limits the spatial resolution. As with every AO system, al.1980, 1993) and theoretical (e.g., Silk 1995) evidence that however, the Ðnal image quality depends on the brightness massive star formation regions in starburst systems are deÐ- of the reference star and its distance from the object of cient in low-mass stars (M ¹ 3M_). It is the purpose of interest. We selected the B1.5 supergiant Sher 25 (Brandner this investigation to use deep star counts as a means of et al.1997a, 1997b) as the wave-front reference star, separat- testing this claim. Even though NGC 3603 is only a small ed by about 20A from the stellar center HD 97950 of NGC starburst by extragalactic standards(Kennicutt 1984), it is a 3603. Its visual magnitude of V \ 12.2(Melnick et al. 1989) major stepping stone for establishing whether starburst is just sufficient for a satisfactory image improvement by initial mass functions (IMFs) are truncated or not. ADONIS(V B 13). The camera SHARP II is based on a It is worth mentioning that the Orion Nebula cluster 256 pixel ] Limit256 pixel NICMOS III detector. The observed (L B 105 L _, two O stars) is certainly not deÐcient in wavelength range covers the atmospheric bands J (1.11È bol 1.40 km), H (1.47È1.82 km), and K (1.99È2.32 km). Com- 1 Based on observations collected at the European Southern Observa- pared with the Johnson K band, we used a somewhat tory, La Silla, Chile, ESO 54.E-1000, ESO 56.D-0573, ESO 57.D-0354. narrower Ðlter to suppress as much as possible the thermal 2 Max-Planck-Institut fu r extraterrestrische Physik, Giessenbach- background. The reference stars SA 100-280 and SA 106- strasse, 85740 Garching, Germany; eisenhau=mpe-garching.mpg.de, genzel=mpe-garching.mpg.de, qui=mpa-garching.mpg.de. 1024 provided the photometric calibration. 3 Astrophysikalisches Institut Potsdam, An der Sternwarte 16, 14482 While we observed the T-shaped mosaic(Fig. 1 [Pl. Potsdam, Germany; hzinnecker=aip.de. 3]) of NGC 3603 with a pixel scale of 100 mas pixel~1, the 278 STELLAR CONTENT OF NGC 3603 279 central region(Fig. 2) of 12A.8]12A.8 was also imaged with could not achieve the same AO correction for the mosaic. In a pixel scale of 50 mas pixel~1. The wave-front reference addition, the coarse sampling with pixels equivalent to 100 star Sher 25 can easily be found in the center of the mosaic; mas increased the FWHM. Depending on the distance to the stellar center of NGC 3603 lies about 20A to the south. the wave-front reference star, the FWHM is between 0A.23 The imaged area is 2190 arcsec2. In the detailed images of and0A.33 in the K band, 0A.32 and 0A.42 in the H band, and the stellar center, the total integration time amounts to 8400 0A.31and 0A.39 in the J band. sintheKband, 9000 s in the H band, and 1500 s in the J As we will explain in° 3, the conservative detection limit band. The mosaic was built from eight di†erent Ðelds with for a point source is about 19.3 (18.4) in K, 19.3 (18.9) in H, integration times of 2400 s (K), 1860 s (H), and 1560 s (J) for and 19.2 (18.4) in J (the numbers enclosed in parentheses the three central Ðelds and integration times of 800 s (K), refer to the detailed images of the central region). 620s(H), and 520 s (J) for the Ðve Ðelds north of Sher 25. DATA REDUCTION Each Ðeld itself is composed of multiple frames with inte- 3. gration times between 1 and 5 s. We could not increase this First we subtracted the sky background from the individ- integration time, because the brightest stars (about 8th ual images, applied a Ñat Ðeld to correct for the variation in magnitude in K band) saturated the detector already within the sensitivity across the Ðeld of view, and corrected for about 3 s. dead pixels. In the mosaic we reconstructed the background Since the reference star was simply too faint and too of every single pixel from its minimal intensity in the eight distant from HD 97950, the AO could not provide fully di†erent Ðelds. In the case of the detailed observations in di†raction-limited images. The applied correction reduced the very center of NGC 3603, we observed separate sky the FWHM of a point source in the detailed images to 0A.18 Ðelds. The Ñat Ðeld comes from sky frames recorded during in the K band,0A.30 in the H band, and 0A.31 in the J band. sunrise and sunset. The large variation in the intensities of These numbers and all of the numbers below refer to the the individual frames allows an accurate determination of stacked images containing all the individual frames of short the Ñat Ðeld in the presence of thermal background and integration times. Close to the reference star, the image straylight. A linear interpolation was used to correct the quality was somewhat better; the FWHM was0A.16 (K), dead and noisy pixels. 0A.27(H), and 0A.26 (J). Unfortunately, the seeing on La Silla Owing to mechanical bending and slightly di†erent Ðeld was not monitored systematically during the observations; positions in the various observations, we had to register the we estimate that the atmospheric seeing was about 1A not individual images before co-adding them. We determined including the turbulence within the dome and the telescope the direction and absolute value of the displacement for itself.