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Adaptive optics with a Laser For Astronomy
3D integral field spectroscopy
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This compact HII region arises from several massive young stars ionising the gas around them. Feldt et al. (1998), with earlier AO images, showed that the region we are looking at here appears to have 3 stars very close to each other. But they were unable to determine their spectral types as they were only resolved in the deconvolution, and so their individual fluxes coudl not be accurately measured.
The AO system corrected on a natural guide star about 10" away. A number of sources can be seen in our K-band image (a preliminary image using only a fraction of our data), which is 1.2" across. In this image, north is roughly up and east left. No post-processing (eg deconvolution) has been applied to this yet and already the stars, which are only 0.2-0.3" apart, are easily resolved The aim of this observation was to extract spectra of the individual stars to determine their type - are they fairly moderate B or even A stars, or is one of them a really hot O star?
| K-band image of G 45.45 +0.06 |
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Data reduced & figures drawn by L. E. Tacconi-Garman