The impact of HII regions on Giant Molecular Cloud properties in nearby galaxies sampled by PHANGS ALMA and MUSE

Author:

Antoine Zakardjian, Jérôme Pety, Cinthya N. Herrera, Annie Hughes, Elias Oakes, Kathryn Kreckel, Chris Faesi, Simon C. O. Glover, Brent Groves, Ralf S. Klessen, Sharon Meidt, Ashley Barnes, Francesco Belfiore, Ivana Bešlić, Frank Bigiel, Guillermo A. Blanc, Mélanie Chevance, Daniel A. Dale, Jakob den Brok, Cosima Eibensteiner, Eric Emsellem, Axel García-Rodríguez, Kathryn Grasha, Eric W. Koch, Adam K. Leroy, Daizhong Liu, Rebecca Mc Elroy, Lukas Neumann, Hsi-An Pan, Miguel Querejeta, Alessandro Razza, Erik Rosolowsky, Toshiki Saito, Francesco Santoro, Eva Schinnerer, Jiyai Sun, Antonio Usero, Elizabeth J. Watkins, Thomas Williams

Keyword:

Astrophysics, Astrophysics of Galaxies, Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA)

journal:

A&A 678, A171 (2023)

date:

2023-05-04 16:00:00

Abstract

We identify giant molecular clouds (GMCs) associated with HII regions for a sample of 19 nearby galaxies using catalogs of GMCs and H regions released by the PHANGS-ALMA and PHANGS-MUSE surveys, using the overlap of the CO and H{\alpha} emission as the key criterion for physical association. We compare the distributions of GMC and HII region properties for paired and non-paired objects. We investigate correlations between GMC and HII region properties among galaxies and across different galactic environments to determine whether GMCs that are associated with HII regions have significantly distinct physical properties to the parent GMC population. We identify trends between the H{\alpha} luminosity of an HII region and the CO peak brightness and the molecular mass of GMCs that we tentatively attribute to a direct physical connection between the matched objects, and which arise independently of underlying environmental variations of GMC and HII region properties within galaxies. The study of the full sample nevertheless hides a large variability galaxy by galaxy. Our results suggests that at the ~100 pc scales accessed by the PHANGS-ALMA and PHANGS-MUSE data, pre-supernova feedback mechanisms in HII regions have a subtle but measurable impact on the properties of the surrounding molecular gas, as inferred from CO observations.

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