20-CM radio-continuum study of the SMC: Part III - Compact HII Regions

TL;DR

This paper presents a new catalogue of 52 compact HII regions in the Small Magellanic Cloud and a deep radio-continuum image at 20 cm, highlighting their thermal emission characteristics.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive catalogue of compact HII regions and a high-resolution radio image of the SMC's N19 region, based on archival data.

Findings

Most detected HII regions have flat spectral indices indicating thermal emission.

The new radio image enhances the understanding of the SMC's ionized regions.

The catalogue provides valuable data for studying star formation in the SMC.

Abstract

We present and discuss a new catalogue of 52 compact HII regions in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) and a newly created deep 1420 MHz (\lambda=20 cm) radio-continuum image of the N19 region located in the southwestern part of the SMC. The new images were created by merging 1420 MHz radio-continuum archival data from the Australian Telescope Compact Array. The majority of these detected radio compact HII regions have rather flat spectral indices which indicates, as expected, that the dominant emission mechanism is of thermal nature.