AAS 201st Meeting, January, 2003
Session 20. Star Formation I
Poster, Monday, January 6, 2003, 9:20am-6:30pm, Exhibit Hall AB

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[20.23] Star Formation in the Disk of NGC 5128

J.G. Funes (Vatican Observatory), M. Rejkuba (European Southern Observatory - Germany), D. Minniti (Department of Astronomy - P. Universidad Catolica - Chile), S. Akiyama, R.C. Kennicutt (Steward Observatory)

NGC 5128 (Centaurus A) is the nearest giant elliptical galaxy. It is also the nearest AGN, with a supermassive black hole and a powerful radio source, as well as the nearest galaxy with shells, that contains a central dust lane, and a populous globular cluster system. We present Very Large Telescope (VLT) optical images of the innermost regions of NGC 5128. Deep photometry (B<25) of the sources seen in these BVRI images allows us to make color-magnitude and color-color diagrams. These diagrams reveal a mixture of populations: we identify young stars and blue clusters, plus old globular clusters, embedded in the dusty regions of the NGC 5128 disk. In addition, H-alpha images taken with the 0.9 m telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory show the complex distribution of ionized gas in the disk component. We identify ring-like and arc-like structures, diffuse and discrete HII regions, etc. Based on this dataset, we discuss the star formation history of the disk of this galaxy.


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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 34, #4
© 2002. The American Astronomical Soceity.