A comprehensive study of circumnuclear star-forming regions (CNSFRs) in early type spirals.

G.F. HÄGELE, A.I. DÍAZ, M.V. CARDACI, E. TERLEVICH, R. TERLEVICH AND G. BOSCH

Tonantzintla, Puebla, México

Workshop; The 2010 Guillermo Haro Workshop in Advanced Astrophysical Research: Compact superstar clusters, birth, evolution and feedback; 2010

Instituto Nacional de Astrofísica, Óptica y Electrónica

We present spectroscopy observations of circumnuclear star forming regions (CNSFR) in the galaxies: NGC 2903, NGC 3351 and NGC 3504, all of them of over solar metallicity according to standard empirical calibrations. Using data of moderate resolution (R~9000) a detailed determination of their abundances is made after careful subtraction of the very prominent underlying stellar absorption. It is found that most regions show the highest abundances in HII region-like objects. It is also shown that CNSFR, as a class, segregate from the disk HII region family, clustering around smaller \eta values, and therefore higher ionizing temperatures. High resolution (R~23000) data are used to map the velocity field in the central kpc of one of the galaxies, NGC 3351, and to measure ionized gas (Hbeta) and stellar (Ca triplet) velocity dispersions for individual CNSFRs.