A spectrophotometric study of planetary nebulae and HII regions in the M83 galaxy

Abstract: Low and intermediate mass stars (0.8-8M$\odot$) in the end of their evolution pass through a series of events of mass loss, which contributes for the enrichment of the interstellar medium. The end of this evolutionary process is preceded by the planetary nebulae (PNe) phase, representing an important source of information for understanding the chemical enrichment of galaxies. The M83 barred galaxy is a relatively nearby galaxy, which allows the spectrophotometric study of its photoionized objects. In the literature, HII regions have been extensively explored in this galaxy, though its PNe population has not previously been addressed. In this work we report, for the first time, a spectrophotometric study of the PNe population in the M83 galaxy. The data was observed with the Gemini GMOS multi-object spectrograph in 2014 using two grating configurations (R400 and B600) and under an excellent seeing condition (< 0.8 arcsec). These data are curently being reduced with the Gemini Pyraf package. In the first phase of this project we wish to confirm spectroscopically the PNe candidates of the sample to further analyze, for the first time, the radial gradient of chemical abundances from the PNe population in this galaxy.