Mid-Ir Emission of Low-Metallicity Galaxies

Extract

NGC 595 is a giant Hɪɪ region located in the western part of the spiral galaxy M 33. It is the second in importance in this galaxy, after NGC 604. At 0.84 Mpc, HST is able to resolve its stellar content. Malumuth et al. (1996) obtained HST UV, U, B and V images of this region and derived an ionizing luminosity of 5 × 10⁵⁰ phots^-1 and an average reddening E_B-V = 0.36±0.28 mag. The stars are mostly concentrated in the central part of the region, where little emission of gas is seen (the ionized gas lies more in a shell around the stars, figure 1a). Wilson & Scoville (1993) showed the molecular gas to be situated in the south-east part of the region, just outside of the bright knot of stars. Viallefond et al. (1986) found a reddening gradient in the north-east/south-west direction by observing the Hi gas, which was confirmed by Malumuth et al. (1996) with stellar photometry.

We obtained ISO images for NGC 595 in the 5.0 to 8.5 μm range. The emission in this spectral range is dominated by the so-called PAH bands. Current interpretation of these has them originating from stochastically heated molecules. Two of these bands are located in the range observed, at 6.2 μm and 7.7 μm. Stochastic heating implies that the in-band flux is directly proportional to the number of photons absorbed by the molecules. For typical HII regions, Cohen et al. (1989) found 0.58 for the I_6.2/I_7.7 in-band ratio. However many processes, ionization, dehydrogenation, can modify this ratio. Furthermore, an underlying continuum is present though its exact origin is unknown.