Hunting Massive Stars Around the Tarantula

FARIÑA, CECILIA; BOSCH, GUILLERMO; BARBÁ, RODOLFO; MORRELL, NIDIA

Pucón, Chile

Conferencia; XI IAU Regional Latin American Meeting of Astronomy; 2005

We have studied the N159A region which is located aproximately at α = 5^{h}40^{m}07^{s} and δ = -69°47´47´´. This region belongs to a major complex called N159 located in the LMC at the southern edge of the 30 Dor Nebula. All the complex is ˜50 pc diameter long and in its interior there are at least six HII regions (N159A, E, F, G, H, K). N159 is an extremely young complex and shows characteristic features of active stellar fomation. The interest in studying N159 is based in the fact that it is an extragalactic (though near) star forming region, in a low metallicity environment and located spatially close to an enormous complex of star formation like 30 Dor. These conditions make N159 an excellent place to study and learn about a subject as sequential star formation, IMF of stars at low metallicities, peculiar objects, etc. In the present work we made a spectrophotometric analysis of a large number of N159 objects. The images used for spectroscopy were taken with the 2.5-m telescope at Las Campanas Observatory (Chile) during the nights from 26th to 28th November 2003. The images, 25 arc minutes wide, were taken with the Wide Field Reimaging CCD Camera, using masks for multiobjet spectroscopy with medium spectral resolution.