Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc.

000, 110 (2009)

Printed 18 August 2009

A (MN L TEX style le v2.2)

Star formation and supernovae in starburst galaxies

Jari J. E. Kajava1 , Genoveva Micheva2 , Olesja Smirnova3 , Auni Somero4 1
Department of Physical Sciences, Astronomy division, P.O.Box 3000, 90014 University of Oulu, Finland Klein Centre for Cosmoparticle Physics, Department of Astronomy, Stockholm University, 10691 Stockholm, Sweden 3 Institute of Astronomy, University of Latvia, Raina bulv. 19, LV-1586 Riga, Latvia 4 Tuorla Observatory, University of Turku, Vislntie 20, FIN-21500 Turku, Finland a aa
2 Oskar

Accepted - . Received - ; in original form -

ABSTRACT

We have studied a sample of ve nearby IR-luminous starburst galaxies by means of optical, near-IR and H imaging, optical long-slit spectroscopy and millimeter CO (1-0) imaging, performed with NOT and Onsala 20m telescopes. The star formation rate (SFR) and supernovae rate (rSN ) estimations for these galaxies are derived from the H imaging. The surface brightness proles of the sample measured from KS imaging are presented, oering the spatial distribution of star formation regions. Using radio-observations together with archival X-ray data, the total mass of gas in M82 star-forming region is estimated to be Mgas 2.1 108 M , yielding the star formation eciency SF E 0.6. The extinction was examined in four regions near the M82 nucleus from the spectroscopic data, using the relative ratios of the H and H lines, leading to the values 3 6 mag. Spectroscopic age-dating by means of H line equivalent width measurement gives values of 6 7 Myr for studied regions. We did a comparison of the near-infrared images to older data in order to nd new supernovae in our galaxies, but nothing was found. In addition, two recently discovered supernovae SN2009gf and SN2009fv were spectroscopically dened to be of type Ia. Key words: Random keywords...

INTRODUCTION

The rst quantitative studies of star formation in nearby galaxies was done by Tinsley (1968), who derived the star formation rates (SFR) from evolutionary synthesis models of galaxy colors. Further modelling by Larson & Tinsley (1978) showed that evolution of low-mass galaxies and interacting galaxies are strongly inuenced by a burst mode of star formation; hence the name starburst galaxy. The development of other SFR diagnostic methods such as integrated emission line uxes (Cohen 1976), near-ultraviolet continuum uxes (Donas & Deharveng 1984) and infrared (IR) continuum uxes (Harper & Low 1973) have allowed the measurements of SRFs in large samples of nearby galaxies. SFRs in galaxies show a large range from basically zero in gas-poor ellipticals, S0 and dwarf galaxies to 20 M year1 in gas rich spirals (see Kennicutt 1998, for review). Also, star formation takes place in two distinct physical environments: in the discs of spiral and irregular
E-mail: jari.kajava@oulu. E-mail: genoveva@astro.su.se E-mail: olesja.smirnova@latnet.lv E-mail: aunsom@utu. c 2009 RAS

galaxies and in compact, dense gas discs in the centers of galaxies (Kennicutt 1998). In galaxies with lower SFRs, nuclear star formation typically occurs at physically similar conditions as in the disc HII regions, with a mean extinction AH 0.8 1.1 mag (Kennicutt 1983; Niklas et al. 1997). However, the IR observations have revealed a population of more luminous nuclear regions, with SFRs up to 1000 M year1 (Rieke & Low 1972; Devereux 1987). These luminous nuclear starbursts are uniquely associated with dense molecular gas discs (Young & Scoville 1991, and references therein) and they are not seen in optical because the visible extinction, due dust and gas absorption, becomes orders of magnitude higher. These nuclear bursts, when they occur, dominate the star formation of the entire galaxy. One of the most dramatic consequence of such star forming conditions is the rate of supernova explosions (SNe) it induces. SNe rates as large as 1.5 year1 has been deduced for Arp 220 (Mattila & Meikle 2001). Therefore, these starburst galaxies have been targets of several SNe observing campaigns (Mattila 2002; Mattila et al. 2002, 2003, 2004, 2007; Kankare et al. 2008). The SFR measurements using dierent diagnostics yield dierent results (Bell & Kennicutt 2001), mainly because of

Jari J. E. Kajava, Genoveva Micheva, Olesja Smirnova, Auni Somero

ve of the galaxies were observed both in near-infrared and optical. In optical we did H imaging and for calibration purposes we also took R images. We used two dierent H lters: the NOT lter #21 (cen =6564 , FWHM=33 ) was A A used for M82 and the lter #49 (cen =6610 , FWHM=50 A ) for the rest of the galaxies. The R lter used was Bessel A R (cen =6500 , FWHM=1300 ). We also observed one A A spectrophotometric standard star, Feige 34, in those lters. The basic calibration frames, biases and skyats, were provided by the telescope sta. In addition to imaging, we did optical spectroscopy. We took one low-resolution spectrum of M82 with the grism #4 (=3200-9100 , R=710) and a 1.0 slit. The slit was A oriented along the parallactic angle, i.e. perpendicular to the horizon, in order to prevent light losses due to atmospheric dispersion. The exposure time of the spectrum was 300s. On the second ALFOSC night the weather was not very good: there were some clouds and the seeing was bad. Thus we decided to skip the H imaging and to concentrate on spectroscopy instead. We took spectra of 2 recently discovered supernovae, SN2009gf and SN2009fv (see Section 3.1 and Table 4), in order to type them. The spectra were taken with the same setup as the M82 spectrum (grism #4 and 1.0 slit) and the exposure time was 600s in both cases. Also arc and at lamp spectra were obtained pointing at the target just after the science exposure. In addition a spectrum of the spectrophotometric standard star SP1234+254 was take for ux calibration purpose. The near-infrared imaging was done by using the Ks lter (NOT #207) that has the central wavelength of 2.14 m and it covers the wavelength range of 1.999-2.282 m. As the sky background is very high in near-infrared (due to atmospheric emission and thermal emission), we executed the observations by using a dithering technique. For calibration, sky ats were again provided by the telescope sta. As photometric standard stars we observed AS33 and AS40 on 2009 June 10 and AS29 on 2009 June 11. The observations were planned with the help of the tools, e.g. visibility plot creator and exposure time calculator, provided on the NOT web page.1 2.2 Optical reduction

the eect of dust obscuration. In principle, the SFR can be directly measured from the H observations using calibrations of Kennicutt et al. (1994) SF R( M year1 ) = 7.9 1042 L(H ) erg s1 . (1)

The reason why this method is so attractive, is that the star formation in nearby galaxies can be mapped at high resolution, but we must keep in mind that the dust obscuration may lead to a signicant underestimation of the true SFR. However, it is possible to correct for this by measuring the H /H line ratio from optical spectroscopy, and comparing it the value expected (Osterbrock 1989b) H /H = 2.86 (2)

in the case where no absorption exist. The only drawback of this method is that the most luminous nuclear starbursts might be completely obscured by the dust in the visual band. Here we report on our NOT broad- (R and KS ) and narrow band (H) imaging observations and Onsala 20m CO(1-0) line observations of nearby starburst galaxies. We derive SFRs for the sample from the H images and as a case study, we also estimate the eects of dust absorption on our SFR estimates using low resolution optical long-slit spectroscopy for the nearest starburst galaxy M82. In addition, we estimate the star formation eciency (SFE) using the total gas mass estimates from the CO(1-0) line observations of M82. We also use the near infrared (NIR) KS imaging observations to make a blind search for dust buried supernovae, by comparing the KS images on previous observations of Mattila et al. (2004).

OBSERVATIONS AND DATA REDUCTION

The observations were done remotely from Tuorla Observatory in Finland as part of the NordForsk Nordic-Baltic Optical/NIR and Radio Astronomy Summer School. The used telescopes were the 2.56m Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT) situated at the Observatorio de Roque de los Muchachos on La Palma and the 20m Onsala radio telescope in Sweden. 2.1 NOT Observations

We used two instruments at the NOT: ALFOSC (Andalucia Faint Object Spectrograph and Camera) was used for optical imaging and spectroscopy, and NOTCam, the nearinfrared camera for imaging and spectroscopy, was used to obtain infrared imaging. The original plan was to observe 2.5 hours with each instrument on separate nights. However, there was some leftover observing time that was granted to our group. Thus we ended up observing twice 2.5 hours with both NOT instruments: NOTCam was used on 2009 June 10 and 11, and ALFOSC on 2009 June 12 and 15. All nights we were observing in the beginning of the night, corresponding approximately to 21:20-23:50 UT. On ALFOSC nights we could start observing slightly earlier than on NOTCam nights. This was because on ALFOSC nights we had to focus the telescope ourselves, when at the NOTCam nights it was done by the local sta present at the telescope. We had a sample of 19 star burst galaxies of which we chose the targets to be observed based on their visibility in La Palma. The observed galaxies are listed in Table 1. Only

In the optical, the data is reduced in the following way: the raw images were cleaned from bad pixels with a bad pixel mask created from a ateld image with the IRAF CCDMASK procedure. Then the bias was subtracted with a masterbias created from 11 bias frames taken the same night. The data was then trimmed, atelded with a normalized masterat created from 3 skyats in each lter, and sky subtracted with a at surface interpolated with a rst order polynomial. In the cases where the galaxy is too big and takes up the entire frame, no sky subtraction was performed since the sky regions could not be identied. We have not cleaned the data from bad pixels or cosmic rays since we had only one frame per lter per galaxy. The exposure times were short, however, so our data does not suer too much cosmic ray contamination. We neglected to subtract
1

http://www.not.iac.es/observing/tools.html c 2009 RAS, MNRAS 000, 110

Star formation and supernovae in starburst galaxies

Table 1. The NOT observing log Galaxy M82 RA 09:55:52.7 Dec +69:40:46 cz [km/s] 203 Filter KS H R KS KS KS H R KS H R KS KS KS KS H R KS H R KS Exposure time [s] 280a 300 50 375b 300c 150d 300 100 300c 300 100 300e 300c 375b 300c 300 100 300c 300 100 375b Date 2009 2009 2009 2009 2009 2009 2009 2009 2009 2009 2009 2009 2009 2009 2009 2009 2009 2009 2009 2009 2009 06 06 06 06 06 06 06 06 06 06 06 06 06 06 06 06 06 06 06 06 06 10 12 12 11 11 10 12 12 10 12 12 11 10 11 10 12 12 11 12 12 11

NGC3310 NGC3471 Arp299

10:38:45.8 10:59:09.0 11:28:30.4

+53:30:12 +61:31:50 +58:34:10

993 2109 3088

NGC4194

12:14:09.5

+54:31:37

2501

NGC4536 NGC5218 NGC5430 NGC5929/30

12:34:27.0 13:32:10.4 14:00:45.7 15:26:07.0

+02:11:17 +62:46:04 +59:19:42 +41:40:24

1808 2933 2961 2539

NGC6181

16:32:20.9

+19:49:36

2375

NGC6764

19:08:16.4

+50:56:00

2416

a b c d e

87s exposures in 5 dierent positions using beamswitching 25s ramp-sampling exposure in 5 dierent positions, cycle repeated 3 times 320s exposures using 5-pont (dice) dithering 103s exposures using 5-point (dice) dithering 320s exposures in 5 dierent positions using beamswitching

the dark current since it is negligible for ALFOSC and subtracting it would only introduce noise. To obtain the nal H images we subtracted the continuum in the following way:

Table 2. Flux correction factors from the spectrophotometric standard star Feige34 for the two H lters Filter #49 #21 Flux [ergs/s/cm2 ] 2.6e-10 1.4e-10 Flux [counts/s] 11414.3 6142. Correction factor 2.29e-14 2.28e-14

H = H Rcont

(3)

where H is the reduced H frame containing the continuum, Rcont is the frame containing only continuum and is the scaling constant. was obtained from the mean ratio of the total ux in point sources in the H and R bands which had identical point spread functions. Using the R lter as continuum is not ideal because it is too broad and contains not only the H line itself but also additional lines, thus making the estimation of the continuum level inaccurate. In order to calibrate the continuum-subtracted H frames, we also reduced the images of the spectrophotometric standards in each H lter. Then we convolved the ux-calibrated spectrum of the standard star with the lter transmission and thus obtained the total ux in each lter in units of erg s1 cm2 . The lter transmission and the spectrum did not have the same stepsize, so we interpolated the missing values. Next, we measured the total ux in units of counts s1 by doing aperture photometry on the reduced images of the standard stars. This gave us a conversion factor between erg s1 cm2 and counts s1 which we used to calibrate our H frames. The ux correction factors for each lter are summarized in Table 2.
c 2009 RAS, MNRAS 000, 110

2.3

Optical spectra reduction

The optical long-slit spectra reduction was performed using the tasks in the IRAF package. It included overscan and masterbias subtraction and at-eld correction using normalized masterat produced from the halogen lamp ats to remove the fringing. Then the spectra were extracted, wavelength calibrated by using a reference HeNe arc lamp spectrum and nally ux calibrated with the help of the spectroscopic ux-standard star data. For M82 spectrum background sky subtraction, extraction of apertures, wavelength calibration, and ux calibration were made using IRAF DOSLIT. Night-sky spectra at 1.5 arcmin distance on both sides of any notable galaxy emission were interpolated in the region of the galactic spectrum and subtracted. In the spatial direction perpendicular to the dispersion axis, ve pixel rows were averaged according to the seeing ( 1.0 arcsec) to enhance the S/N without loosing any spatial information. Thus, each resulting extracted spectrum of the spatially resolved emission corresponds to 1 1 along and perpendicular to the slit direc-

Jari J. E. Kajava, Genoveva Micheva, Olesja Smirnova, Auni Somero

a) E N b) A1 A2 A3 A4 1 5 E N

c) A1 A2 A3 A4 5 E

d) A1 A2 A3 A4 5 E

Figure 1. a) R-band image of M82 with the slit position of our observations at P.A. = 65.56 deg indicated by the line. b), c), d) The R-band, H and KS -band images, respectively, of the central 0.60.5 arcmin region of M82. The ALFOSC 1 long-slit has been overlaid, with centers of four extraction regions marked as A1, A2, A3 and A4.

tion. In total, out of 11 apertures extracted from the frame only four were selected for further analysis: those situated near the H-luminous M82 nuclear region and having H line intensity above the noise. The positions of these apertures in slit projected on our M82 images taken at dierent photometrical bands are shown in Figure 1(b-d). Following the wavelength calibration and ux calibration (using the standard star Feige 34), the foreground Milky Way reddening was corrected using values from Schlegel et al. (1998) as listed in NED (AV = 0.526 mag) and the extinction law from Cardelli et al. (1989). The spectrum of aperture A3 reduced in this way is presented in Figure 2.

30 25

H NII

Flux (10 15erg s 1cm 2 1)

20 15 10

NII

H
5 0 4500

SiII

5000

5500

6000

6500

7000

Wavelength ()

2.4

NIR reduction

In the NIR, we used the NOTCAM package for IRAF but we will briey outline the major reduction steps. The night sky in the NIR is usually much brighter than the target. Removing the sky correctly is therefore of highest priority. A sloppy sky subtraction can lead to systematic errors that dominate the luminosity output of the target, introduce features in the radial surface brightness prole, give spurious target colors, etc. The targets were observed in the Ks band both in chopping mode (beam switching) and dithering mode, depending on their size. The rst step of the reduction was then to re-

Figure 2. Flux calibrated ALFOSC long-slit spectrum of M82 aperture A3.

move the sky from the raw frames either by subtracting a sky frame or by subtracting a neighboring dithered galaxy frame. In either case the resulting sky subtracted frame contains sources that appear negative. The data was then atelded with a masterat created from 3 skyats. Dark current and bias are not explicitly subtracted during reductions in the NIR because they automatically cancel out during the
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Star formation and supernovae in starburst galaxies

Table 3. Zero point correction factors obtained from individual Table 4. The observed supernovae. galaxy frames at dierent times during the night. The large temporal variation of the zero point is due to the non-photometric conditions Supernova RA Dec of the night. SN2009fv 16:29:44.22 +40:48:41.8 SN2009gf 14:15:37.12 +14:16:48.7 Galaxy ZP ZP correction [mag] Arp299 M82 NGC5929/30 NGC4194 NGC6181 23.8 (weighted mean) 24.4 25.3 25.2 25.0 (weighted mean) factor 2.86e-10 1.74e-10 7.29e-11 8.25e-11 9.86e-11 a recessional velocity of the host galaxy

Host galaxy NGC 6173 NGC 5525

cza [km/s] 8784 5553

3 3.1

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION Typing of supernovae

pair subtraction. The frames were aligned and stacked, using a median combine. This also removes all negative sources if there are enough frames and the sky subtraction on each frame was successful. The calibration was performed against 2MASS sources located in each reduced galaxy frame, which had suitable 2MASS photometry ags. Such sources were not freely available, so we used sources with large photometric errors, e.g. K = 0.2 mag, and in the case of M82 and Arp299, sources suering from galaxy contamination with ags gal contam = 2.0 (instead of 0), rd ag = 2 and cc ag = 0. The zero-points for each frame are summarized in Table 3.

2.5

Radio observations and reduction

We observed the core regions of M82 with the Onsala 20m telescope on 2009 June 14 to estimate the mass of molecular gas within the galaxy. Because of the limited capability of the telescope to observe faint extragalactic sources, we chose to observe the CO(1-0) line at 115 GHz. Other molecular gas tracers such as the CO(2-1) line would have been better than the CO(1-0) line because they remain optically thin for higher densities and would therefore give more accurate results. The beam size of the observations at 115 GHz was 30. We observed the central 1 region of M82 using a 5 5 grid with 15 spacing between the dierent pointings to assure that the intensity map is Nyquist sampled. The reduction of the radio data was done using the XS software as follows. We rst read the 5 5 map into the XS. We went to multiple view mode and changed the scale to velocity. We then averaged the individual scans according to the system temperature and integration time. Because our data was very noisy, we decided to increase our signal by lowering the resolution. Our CO(1-0) line was very broad, so we decided set a 20 km/s resolution by using a Gaussian weight function in rebinning the data. This gave us a clear signal for most of the individual pointings. Our baseline was rather well behaved in most of the observations. We therefore chose to use two baseline boxes around the emission line and used a rst order polynomial to subtract the baseline. We then added a moment box, that covered the observed emission line. After these reduction steps, we plotted the Pos&Pos contour map. We then played around with the contour levels to get an esthetically pleasing map (see Fig. 6). We chose to use a false color map with linear scaling, with a second order bi-cubic interpolation over the dierent pointings.
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The spectra of the two observed supernovae, SN2009fv and SN2009gf, are presented in Figure 3. We identify both of the supernovae to be of type Ia. This is because the spectra lack hydrogen lines and especially because they exhibit a strong Si II absorption line (6355 ). Also other spectral A features characteristic for SNe Ia are present, e.g. a Ca II H&K doublet at 3934and 3968(Filippenko 1997). A A We tted a Gaussian prole to the most prominent features of the spectra and measured the central wavelength of these lines. The tting was done in IRAF with the task splot and the key command k. Combining this information with the recessional velocity of the host galaxy (see Table 4), we could dene the velocity of the absorbing medium, i.e. the expansion velocity of the supernova ejecta. For SN2009fv we measured a blueshifted position of Si II at 6318.62, yielding a velocity of 10499 km/s of the A expanding gas. For SN2009gf we found Si II at 6246.6, A corresponding to a velocity of 10666 km/s. We reported these results in an immediately published CBET telegram (Somero et al. 2009). Supernovae Ia are produced from accreting binary systems when the mass of the accreting white dwarf exceeds the critical Chandrashekar mass (1.4M ) causing a thermonuclear runaway. The other types of supernovae are so called core collapse supernovae where a single star collapses under its own gravitation when the ssion reactions can not continue in the centre and thus the radiation pressure is not sucient to keep the star in hydrodynamical equilibrium. Supernovae Ia occur in all type of galaxies whereas the other types are found mostly in spiral galaxies and starburst galaxies. 3.2 H imaging

In Table 5 we present the SFRs and other basic parameters, calculated for our sample galaxies using H-imaging. The total (calibrated) H ux of the entire galaxy was obtained using IRAF IMEXAM task. For comparison the values found in the literature, SFRL (H ), for these galaxies are listed. We also made an estimation of the supernova rates based on the calculated SFRs of the galaxy sample. For this we used the Equation (3) in Mattila & Meikle (2001). These values are presented in Table 5 as well. 3.3 M82 long-slit spectroscopy

To determine the extinction from material associated with M82 in our selected regions we used the observed Balmer

Jari J. E. Kajava, Genoveva Micheva, Olesja Smirnova, Auni Somero

Figure 3. The spectra of the supernovae SN2009fv and SN2009gf.

Table 5. The physical properties and SFRs of sample galaxies derived from the H imaging. SFRL (H ) is the star formation rate found in literature, rSN is the estimated supernova rate calculated using the SFRs. Galaxy Arp299 M82 NGC4194 NGC6181 NGC5929/30 Distance (Mpc) 41 4.5 36.5 33.55 38.5 Flux (erg/s/cm2 ) 1.4E-10 1.87E-9 6.3E-11 1.5E-10 6.8E-12 Luminosity (erg/s) 2.8E+43 4.5E+42 1.0E+43 2.0E+43 1.2E+42 SFR(H ) (M /yr) 222 36 79 159 9.5 SFRL (H ) (M /yr) 60-300a * 49b * 6c rSN (yr1 ) 1.55 0.25 0.55 1.11 0.07

a Alonso-Herrero et al. (1998) b Hancock et al. (2006) c Bower & Wilson (1995)

line ux ratios R = F (H )/F (H ) together with Case B recombination theory (Hummer & Storey 1987). The observed Balmer decrements are given in Table 6. These decrements have been converted into the reddening, E(B V ), using the standard interstellar extinction curve of Osterbrock (1989a). This interstellar extinction curve leads to the expression E(B V ) = a log(R/Rintr ) (4)

Table 6. The F (H)/F (H) ratios, inferred reddening and extinction values, equivalent widths of H lines and corresponding ages of the four M82 apertures. Aperture A1 A2 A3 A4 R 21 8 9 14 E(B V ) (mag) 1.9 1.0 1.1 1.5 AV (mag) 5.9 3.1 3.5 4.7 W (H ) () A 4.4 12.2 14.6 22.7 Age (Myr) 6.8 5.9 5.8 5.6

where a = 2.21 is a constant, R is the observed Balmer decrement, Rintr = 2.86 is the intrinsic Balmer decrement. The signicant uncertainties in our measurement of E(B V ) can be expected by several reasons. The H line is blended with the NII lines and so an unambiguous determination of the H ux is dicult without higher resolution data. In addition, the H ux is uncertain due to the fact that it is weak compared with the local continuum and so it is sensitive to the modelling of that continuum. Using the obtained reddening we calculated the corresponding visual extinction AV values assuming a standard Galactic extinction law with RV = AV /E(B V ) = 3.1 (Rieke & Lebofsky 1985). After the de-reddening of the spectra, the equivalent widths of hydrogen recombination lines, particularly H, can be used as an accurate indicator of the age of the population in the case of an instantaneous burst of star formation, as rst pointed out by Copetti et al. (1986). Table 6

presents the measured H equivalent widths W (H) for each of our four apertures. We used Schaerer & Vacca (1998) evolutionary synthesis models to determine the ages of regions, assuming a solar metallicity following the McLeod et al. (1993a). We can compare our results on extinction and agedating to the recently obtained by Konstantopoulos et al. (2009) during the spectroscopical study of M82 stellar cluster population, since the apertures inside the slits #67 in those research were located close to our studied regions. The authors obtained extinction values AV from photometrical data that, range between 1.7 1.9 mag (corrected for foreground galactic extinction). These values are somewhat smaller that we found, but taking into account uncertainties
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Star formation and supernovae in starburst galaxies

Table 7. Parameters for the surface brightness proles. The width of the elliptical rings is 2 pixels for all galaxies. The position angles P.A. are measured North through East. e is the ellipticity. Galaxy Arp299 M82 NGC4194 NGC6181 NGC5929/30 RA 11:28:30.7 09:55:55.2 12:14:09.6 16:32:21.6 15:26:07.2 DEC +58:33:04.4 +69:40:48.0 +54:30:00.0 +19:49:48.0 +41:40:48.0 e 0.0 0.75 0.33 0.5 0.0 P.A. 0 68 15 0 0

Table 8. Total luminosity in Vega magnitudes for all galaxies obtained by summing up the ux inside each elliptic ring during the integration. Galaxy Arp299 M82 NGC4194 NGC6181 NGC5929/30 Total luminosity (mag) 8.73 4.69 9.26 11.02 8.34

and the spatial discrepancy of studied regions we can consider our results suitable. However, our estimations of ages for studied regions are consistent with values of 4 10 Myr found by Konstantopoulos et al. (2009) from the spectroscopic data.

3.4

NIR observations

The near-infrared KS images of all the observed galaxies were compared to older KS images provided us by Seppo Mattila. The images had been taken during the years 2001-2006 with dierent near-infrared instruments at La Palma (NOTCam at the NOT, or LIRIS and INGRID at the William Herschel Telescope operated by Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes2 ). First the images of the same galaxy were shifted and scaled to match with each others in orientation and scaling. This was done with an CL script written by Seppo Mattila. Further image subtraction was done with ISIS image subtraction package (Alard 2000). As a result of the image subtraction, we did not nd any new sources in the images. In the KS band we also plotted the surface brightness proles of the galaxies (Fig. 4). Tables 7 and 8 summarize the integration parameters for each galaxy and the total luminosity in Vega magnitudes, respectively. The surface brightness proles indicate that NGC 4194 and NGC 6181 are not undergoing a (major) merger since their proles are a smoothly decreasing curve with no additional peaks. The rest of the proles, however, show the presence of companion galaxies close to the center of integration, indication a major merger. For Arp299 the two extra peaks in the surface brightness prole come from the two cores marked in Figure 5. The M82 prole indicates resolved structure in the core, giving rise to the bumpy features. The galaxy obviosuly covers the entire image, with high signal-to-noise out to and beyond 40 kpc, which is why the errorbars for that prole are negligible. For NGC 5929/30, the center of integration is at NGC 5930 and NGC 5929 is clearly visible as the sharp peak around 29.

Figure 5. Ks image of Arp299. The red circle marks the center of integration, which is the brightest pixel in the image. The black circles mark the cores whose contribution to the Arp299 surface brightness prole can be seen in the two extra peaks around 10 3 and 25 in Figure 4.

< I >= 117K km s1 ,

5 1 2

(5)

which corresponds to I = 3.3 10 K km s arcsec . We must caution, that the the CO(1-0) was optically thick at the center of our extraction radius. Therefore, we have underestimated the intensity slightly and the following equations do not strictly apply and the results must be taken as order of magnitude estimates. We estimated the hydrogen column density of the emitting molecular gas from the CO(1-0) emission using the conversion factor N (H2 ) = X 1020 TCO dV cm2 , (6)

where X [ 0.5 3 ] is the so called X factor (see Bell et al. 2006, for uncertainties of this factor) and TCO dV =< I >= 117 K km s1 in our case. Plugging in the measured value we get N (H2 ) 1.2 1022 cm2 , (7)

3.5

Radio observations

To extract the intensity over the region where most of the emission was observed to originate, we used a 30 extraction region radius with -5 and -5 osets in right ascension and declination (see Fig. 6). We measured an intensity

assuming that X 1. The column density of neutral hydrogen can be estimated from the HI line N (H) = 1.82 1018 TB dV cm2 , (8)

http://www.ing.iac.es

where TB is given in K km s1 . However, as we didnt observe this emission line, we must estimate this using an indirect method. One possibility to measure the neutral hydrogen

c 2009 RAS, MNRAS 000, 110

Jari J. E. Kajava, Genoveva Micheva, Olesja Smirnova, Auni Somero

Figure 4. Surface brightness proles for all galaxies. The parameters of each integration can be seen in Table 7.

column density is through soft X-ray observations of the luminous X-ray sources within the star forming region. We therefore modeled the available Chandra data of the most luminous X-ray sources to which have a power-law spectra within the observed X-ray band. As these spectra are inuenced by the line of sight hydrogen only up to photon energies of 2 keV (Chandra data goes up to 8 keV), we were able to derive a best tting hydrogen column density of

which is an order of magnitude higher than the Galactic absorption column (Dickey & Lockman 1990). Therefore, we associate this value to be intrinsic to the gas within M82. Using Equations 7 and 9, we can derive the visual extinction within the star forming region from a relation AV 5 1022 (N (H) + 2N (H2 )) 15 mag, (10)

which is in good agreement with the estimation of AV = [ 12 27 ] by McLeod et al. (1993b). We can also estimate the extinction in the KS band using the scaling by Draine (1989) AK 0.1 AV 1.5 mag, (11)
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N (H) 0.6 1022 cm2 ,

(9)

Star formation and supernovae in starburst galaxies

4 CONCLUSIONS

Figure 6. CO(1-0) intensity map of the core of M82. The extraction region for Eq. 5 is shown as a red dashed line.

Therefore, we see that we can penetrate the star formation region in the KS band, while in the R band the interstellar gas absorbs most of the radiation, which is also evident from our photometry (add ref to gures). This fact has to be taken into account when we estimate the star formation rate from our H images. Otherwise the true star formation rate will be underestimated. Finally, we can estimate the amount of gas within M82 from the measured column densities. As the distance to M82 is 3.9 Mpc, the surface area from where we extracted the CO(1-0) intensity is A = R2 9.7 1042 cm2 , (12)

We have carried out the investigation of ve starburst galaxies using the optical and near-infrared imaging, optical longslit spectroscopy and millimeter CO (1-0) imaging. The following main results were obtained from our studies: 1) The SFRs and supernovae rates of sample galaxies are derived and surface brightness proles and total luminosities are found from KS images. 2) The estimation of the hydrogen column density N (H2 ) of the emitting molecular gas in the core of M82 galaxy is performed using the observed intensity of CO (10) line, leading to the value of N (H2 ) 1.21022 cm2 . Also the neutral hydrogen column density value N (H) 0.6 1022 cm2 is derived using X-ray observational data. That allows us to estimate the visual extinction and hydrogen mass values, yielding AV 15 mag and Mgas 2.1108 M respectively. The SFE value of 0.6 was found using previously derived parameters. 3) The visual extinction in four regions near M82 nucleus is estimated using the observed H /H ratios, leading to the value of AV 3 6 mag, which is slightly higher than that measured by other authors in nearby regions. The estimations of ages of studied regions using H equivalent widths and Schaerer & Vacca (1998) evolutionary synthesis models yields values of 6 7 Myr, consistent with other authors estimations. 4) The search for highly obscured core-collapse supernovae was performed for the near-IR images by comparing older near-IR images of the same galaxies to our data; as a result no new sources were registered. 5) The spectra of the two observed supernovae, SN2009fv and SN2009gf, are classied as type Ia according to the lack of hydrogen lines and the presence of strong SiII absorption line (6355 ). The measured blueshifted posiA tions of SiII line suggest the expansion velocity of the ejecta of SN2009fv and SN2009gf to be 10499 and 10666 km/s, respectively.

because the 30 extraction radius at the distance of M82 corresponds to 570 pc. Therefore, assuming that most of the mass is in hydrogen we have Mgas mH A(N (H) + 2N (H2 )) 2.1 108 M , (13)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We acknowledge the organisers of the NordForsk summer school as well as the NOT sta for all help with the observations. The data presented here have been taken using ALFOSC, which is owned by the Instituto de Astrosica de Andalucia (IAA) and operated at the Nordic Optical Telescope under agreement between IAA and the NBIfAFG of the Astronomical Observatory of Copenhagen. Based on observations made with the Nordic Optical Telescope, operated on the island of La Palma jointly by Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden, in the Spanish Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos of the Instituto de Astrosica de Canarias.

where mH is the mass of hydrogen, which is very close to the proton mass mp . This mass estimate is very close to the values given in Hughes et al. (1990) who gave an estimate of Mgas [ 2.2 9 ] 108 M . The reason why our mass estimate is slightly below the values is most likely due to the fact that our 30 extraction radius doesnt cover the entire emission of the M82. Also, as our CO(1-0) line was optically thick, we have underestimated the amount of N (H2 ), which decreases our mass estimate. Now, using previously derived SFR value for M82, the star formation eciency (SFE) can be estimated as SF E = (SF R) tsf /Mgas , (14)

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where tsf is typical timescale of star formation. We adopt here the value of tsf = 3.3 106 yr found by Inoue et al. (2000). Consequently we estimated the SFE to be 0.6.
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Jari J. E. Kajava, Genoveva Micheva, Olesja Smirnova, Auni Somero

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