AAS 197, January 2001
Session 79. Nearby Galaxies II
Display, Wednesday, January 10, 2001, 9:30am-7:00pm, Exhibit Hall

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[79.17] Testing Star Formation Rate Indicators with LMC HII Regions

E. F. Bell, K. D. Gordon, R. C. Kennicutt, D. Zaritsky (Steward Observatory)

The Magellanic Clouds provide a unique opportunity to investigate the systematic uncertainties inherent to commonly-used star formation rate indicators. Far-UV through radio spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of a sample of HII regions in the Large Magellanic Cloud have been derived. Using these HII region SEDs, we have explored the balance of far-IR and far-UV luminosities, the attenuation suffered by H\alpha light, and relationship between the ionizing and non-ionizing far-UV luminosities. We also explore the difficulties encountered when trying to use these SEDs to constrain the ages, recently-formed stellar masses and obscurations of our sample of HII regions. This work was supported by NASA LTSA grant NAG5-8426.


The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: ebell@as.arizona.edu

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