Ionized Gas Kinematics At High Resolution. II. Discovery Of A Double Infrared Cluster In II Zw 40

The nearby dwarf galaxy II Zw 40 hosts an intense starburst. At the center of the starburst is a bright compact radio and infrared source, thought to be a giant dense H II region containing approximate to 14,000 O stars. Radio continuum images suggest that the compact source is actually a collection of several smaller emission regions. We accordingly use the kinematics of the ionized gas to probe the structure of the radio-infrared emission region. With TEXES on the NASA-IRTF we measured the 10.5 mu m [S IV] emission line with effective spectral resolutions, including thermal broadening, of similar to 25 and similar to 3 km s(-1) and spatial resolution similar to 1 ''. The line profile shows two distinct, spatially coextensive, emission features. The stronger feature is at galactic velocity and has FWHM 47 km s(-1). The second feature is similar to 44 km s(-1) redward of the first and has FWHM 32 km s(-1). We argue that these are two giant embedded clusters, and estimate their masses to be approximate to 3 x 10(5) M-circle dot and approximate to 1.5 x 10(5) M-circle dot. The velocity shift is unexpectedly large for such a small spatial offset. We suggest that it may arise in a previously undetected kinematic feature remaining from the violent merger that formed the galaxy.