A Lifetime of Influence: Abstracts, Talks, and Posters
 

Near Infrared Catalogue of Galactic Giant HII Regions

Alessandro Moises
IAG-USP

Elysandra Figueredo
Open University

Augusto Damineli
IAG-USP

Robert Blum
NOAO

Peter Conti
JILA

In this work, we present a near infrared photometric catalog of Giant HII (GHII) regions along the Galactic plane. For this purpose, we have used CTIO-Blanco and SOAR telescopes to image (J, H and K-band) 26 GHII regions selected from the sample of (Conti & Crowther, 2004). The JHK data (CMD and CCD diagrams) show us the stellar content, the ionizing sources and the YSOs in each region. Also, we have obtained K-band spectra of the ionizing sources (OB stars) with the aim of identifying their spectral types and derive the spectrophotometric distance to each HII region. Here, we present some results based on these K-band spectroscopic data. These data open a new window in the Galactic structure knowledge since they show us discrepancies between our estimates and distance determinations based on kinematical methods. However, our results are in agreement with others based on direct determinations. These differences between direct distance determinations, like ours, and indirect determinations (kinematic techniques) bring new perspectives about the Milky Way morphology as a whole.