Dwarf irregular galaxy KK 230: A relatively young galaxy on the Local Group periphery?
Yakobchuk, TM |
Kinemat. fiz. nebesnyh tel (Online) 2008, 24(3):186-197 |
Language: Russian |
Abstract: We present a photometric study of the resolved stellar content of the dwarf irregular galaxy KK 230 on the basis of archival data on Hubble Space Telescope's observations. The resulting color-magnitude diagram for KK 230 stars reaches about 27m in V and I filters and contains stellar populations of various age. The youngest main-sequence stars of KK 230 are found to have an age of about 32 Myr and to be distributed on the images along one line in the north-south direction, that could be explained by the observed H I kinematics. The older blue-loop stars and red supergiants have ages no less than 160 Myr and suggest episodic star formation in the last several hundreds of million years. From the tip of the red giant branch a distance modulus was found to be m - M = 26.5m, which corresponds to the distance D = 2 Mpc. On the assumption of the average absolute magnitude MI,RC of the red clump and its color (V-I)I,RC, the conclusion is made that the majority of KK 230 stars have an age less than 2—3 Gyr and the metallicity Z ≈ 0.0004. |
Keywords: dwarf galaxy, young galaxy |