Survey of O VI absorption in the Large Magellanic Cloud

Abstract

We present a survey of interstellar O VI absorption in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) towards 70 lines of sight based on Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) observations. The survey covers O VI absorption in a large number of objects in different environmental conditions of the LMC. Overall, a high abundance of O VI is present in active and inactive regions of the LMC with mean log N(O VI) = 14.23 atoms cm-2. There is no correlation observed between O VI absorption and emissions from the hot gas (X-ray surface brightness) or the warm gas (Hα surface brightness). O VI absorption in the LMC is patchy and the properties are similar to that of the Milky Way (MW). In comparison to the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), O VI is lower in abundance even though SMC has a lower metallicity compared to the LMC and the MW. We present observations in 10 superbubbles of the LMC of which we detect O VI absorption in five superbubbles for the first time and the superbubbles show an excess O VI absorption of about 40 per cent compared to non-superbubble lines of sight. We have also studied the properties of O VI absorption in the 30 Doradus region. Even though O VI does not show any correlation with X-ray emission for the LMC, a good correlation between log N(O VI) and X-ray surface brightness for 30 Doradus region is present. We also find that O VI abundance decreases with increasing distance from the star cluster R136.