Description
High-excitation compact HII regions of the Magellanic Clouds are sites of recent massive star formation in low metallicity environments. Detailed study of these regions and their environments using high-spatial resolution observations is necessary to better understand massive star formation, which is still an unsolved problem. We aim at a detailed study of the Small Magellanic Cloud compact HII region N26, which is only ~4" in diameter. This study is based on high spatial resolution imaging (~0.1"-0.3") in JHKs and L' bands, using the VLT equipped with the NAOS adaptive optics system. A larger region (~50pcx76pc) was also imaged at medium spatial resolution, using the ESO 2.2m telescope in optical wavelengths. We also used the JHKs archival data from the IRSF survey and the Spitzer Space Telescope SAGE-SMC survey.
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