The Resolved Stellar Populations in the LEGUS Galaxies1
Sabbi, E; Calzetti, D; Ubeda, L; Adamo, A; Cignoni, M; Thilker, D; Aloisi, A; Elmegreen, BG; Elmegreen, DM; Gouliermis, DA; Grebel, EK; Messa, M; Smith, LJ; Tosi, M; Dolphin, A; Andrews, JE; Ashworth, G; Bright, SN; Brown, TM; Chandar, R; Christian, C; Clayton, GC; Cook, DO; Dale, DA; De Mink, SE; Dobbs, C; Evans, AS; Fumagalli, M; Gallagher, JS; Grasha, K; Herrero, A; Hunter, DA; Johnson, KE; Kahre, L; Kennicutt, RC; Kim, H; Krumholz, MR; Lee, JC; Lennon, D; Martin, C; Nair, P; Nota, A; Ostlin, G; Pellerin, A; Prieto, J; Regan, MW; Ryon, JE; Sacchi, E; Schaerer, D; Schiminovich, D; Shabani, F; Van Dyk, SD; Walterbos, R; Whitmore, BC; Wofford, A
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This is the final version. Available from American Astronomical Society via the DOI in this record
The Legacy ExtraGalactic UV Survey (LEGUS) is a multiwavelength Cycle 21 Treasury program on the Hubble Space Telescope. It studied 50 nearby star-forming galaxies in 5 bands from the near-UV to the I-band, combining new Wide Field Camera 3 observations with archival Advanced Camera for Surveys data. LEGUS was designed to investigate how star formation occurs and develops on both small and large scales, and how it relates to the galactic environments. In this paper we present the photometric catalogs for all the apparently single stars identified in the 50 LEGUS galaxies. Photometric catalogs and mosaicked images for all filters are available for download. We present optical and near-UV color-magnitude diagrams for all the galaxies. For each galaxy we derived the distance from the tip of the red giant branch. We then used the NUV color-magnitude diagrams to identify stars more massive than 14 Mo, and compared their number with the number of massive stars expected from the GALEX FUV luminosity. Our analysis shows that the fraction of massive stars forming in star clusters and stellar associations is about constant with the star formation rate. This lack of a relation suggests that the timescale for evaporation of unbound structures is comparable or longer than 10 Myr. At low star formation rates this translates to an excess of mass in clustered environments as compared to model predictions of cluster evolution, suggesting that a significant fraction of stars form in unbound systems.
A.A. acknowledges partial support from the Swedish Royal
Academy. G.A. acknowledges support from the Science and
Technology Facilities Council (ST/L00075X/1 and ST/
M503472/1). C.D. acknowledges funding from the FP7 ERC
starting grant LOCALSTAR (no. 280104). M.F. acknowledges
support by the Science and Technology Facilities Council
(grant number ST/L00075X/1). D.A.G. kindly acknowledges
financial support by the German Research Foundation (DFG)
through program GO1659/3-2. These observations are associated
with program # 13364. Support for program # 13364
was provided by NASA through a grant from the Space
Telescope Science Institute. This work is based on observations
obtained with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, at the
Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the
Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc.,
under NASA contract NAS 5-26555.
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