Abstract
Subarcsecond radio and infrared observations reveal a class of luminous, obscured, optically thick HII regions associated with extremely large young clusters in nearby starburst galaxies. VLA images show bright radio nebulae with ne ∼ 104 cm−3, densities characteristic of young Galactic compact HII regions. Excitation of the nebulae requires the presence of several thousand O stars within regions of 1-10 pc extent, corresponding to clusters containing 105–106 stars. The compact nebulae are also bright in the mid-infrared, and can for significant fractions of not only the total IR luminosity, but also the total bolometric luminosity, of the parent galaxies. The prototype for these “supernebulae” is the large, obscured cluster in the dwarf galaxy NGC 5253.
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