First survey of Wolf-Rayet star populations over the full extension of
  nearby galaxies observed with CALIFA
  The search of extragalactic regions with conspicuous presence of Wolf-Rayet
(WR) stars outside the Local Group is challenging task due to the difficulties
in detecting their faint spectral features. In this exploratory work, we
develop a methodology to perform an automated search of WR signatures through a
pixel-by-pixel analysis of integral field spectroscopy (IFS) data belonging to
the Calar Alto Legacy Integral Field Area survey, CALIFA. This technique
allowed us to build the first catalogue of Wolf-Rayet rich regions with
spatially-resolved information, allowing to study the properties of these
complexes in a 2D context. The detection technique is based on the
identification of the blue WR bump (around He II 4686 {\AA}, mainly associated
to nitrogen-rich WR stars, WN) and the red WR bump (around C IV 5808 {\AA} and
associated to carbon-rich WR stars, WC) using a pixel-by-pixel analysis. We
identified 44 WR-rich regions with blue bumps distributed in 25 galaxies of a
total of 558. The red WR bump was identified only in 5 of those regions. We
found that the majority of the galaxies hosting WR populations in our sample
are involved in some kind of interaction process. Half of the host galaxies
share some properties with gamma-ray burst (GRB) hosts where WR stars, as
potential candidates to being the progenitors of GRBs, are found. We also
compared the WR properties derived from the CALIFA data with stellar population
synthesis models, and confirm that simple star models are generally not able to
reproduce the observations. We conclude that other effects, such as the binary
star channel (which could extend the WR phase up to 10 Myr), fast rotation or
other physical processes that causes the loss of observed Lyman continuum
photons, are very likely affecting the derived WR properties, and hence should
be considered when modelling the evolution of massive stars.
