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Herschel Far IR observations of the giant HII region NGC 3603

We observed the giant HII region around the NGC 3603 YC with the 5 broad bands (70, 160, 250, 350, 500 micron) of the SPIRE and PACS instruments, on-board the Herschel Space Observatory. Together with what is currently known of the stellar, atomic, molecular and warm dust components, this additional and crucial information should allow us to better understand the details of the star formation history in this region. The main objective of the investigation is to study, at high spatial resolution, the distribution and main physical characteristics of the cold dust. By reconstructing the temperature and density maps, we found respectively a mean value of 36 K and Log(NH)=22.0+/-0.1 cm^(-2). We carried out a photometric analysis detecting 107 point-like sources, mostly confined to the North and South of the cluster. By comparing our data with SED models we found that 35 sources are well represented by YSOs in early evolutionary phases, from Classes0 to ClassI. The Herschel detections also provided far-IR counterparts for 4 H2O masers and 11 objects previously known from mid-IR observations. The existence of so many embedded sources confirms the hypothesis of an intense and ongoing star formation activity in the region around NGC3603YC.