Spitzer Observations of Dust Emission from HII Regions in the Large Magellanic Cloud

Ian W. Stephens, Jessica Marie Evans, Rui Xue, You-Hua Chu, Robert A. Gruendl, Dominique M. Segura-Cox

Published 2014-02-08, updated 2014-02-23Version 2

Massive stars can alter physical conditions and properties of their ambient interstellar dust grains via radiative heating and shocks. The HII regions in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) offer ideal sites to study the stellar energy feedback effects on dust because stars can be resolved, and the galaxy's nearly face-on orientation allows us to unambiguously associate HII regions with their ionizing massive stars. The Spitzer Space Telescope survey of the LMC provides multi-wavelength (3.6 to 160 $\mu$m) photometric data of all HII regions. To investigate the evolution of dust properties around massive stars, we have analyzed spatially-resolved IR dust emission from two classical HII regions (N63 and N180) and two simple superbubbles (N70 and N144) in the LMC. We produce photometric spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of numerous small subregions for each region based on its stellar distributions and nebular morphologies. We use DustEM dust emission model fits to characterize the dust properties. Color-color diagrams and model fits are compared with the radiation field (estimated from photometric and spectroscopic surveys). Strong radial variations of SEDs can be seen throughout the regions, reflecting the available radiative heating. Emission from very small grains drastically increases at locations where the radiation field is the highest, while polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) appear to be destroyed. PAH emission is the strongest in the presence of molecular clouds, provided that the radiation field is low.