Abstract:
Studying young stellar populations within galaxies can help refine our understanding of recent star formation in galaxies and their evolution. With this motivation, we present a catalog of ~25,000 recently formed (within 400 Myr) star-forming clumps (SFCs) in 17 morphologically diverse nearby galaxies, including 8 massive, classic spirals, 6 intermediate-mass, flocculent spirals, and 3 dwarf irregulars. We used far- (FUV) and near-UV observations from the Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope, whose ~ 1.″5 angular resolution and 28' field of view allow us to probe SFCs at a mean physical scale of ~54 pc, within the full extent of our galaxies. We adopted a homogeneous SFC detection criterion, corrected for spatially varying dust attenuation (using 6″ resolution AV maps, made by combining FUV with archival infrared observations), and estimated the SFC ages by comparing the observed UV color--magnitude diagrams with Starburst99 simple stellar population models. Using our SFC catalog, we studied the age demographic of the recently formed stellar populations across different galaxy morphologies and observed age trends consistent with several well-known phenomena, such as the inside-out formation of disk galaxies, local gravitational instabilities leading to flocculent spiral arms, and the stochastic nature of star formation in dwarf galaxies. Leveraging full galaxy coverage and FUV data, our catalog complements existing optically identified star cluster catalogs in the literature toward improving our understanding of star formation across a wide range of galaxy morphologies, masses, and environments. We make the SFC catalog and AV maps of our 17 galaxies publicly available with this paper.
