Bibcode
Simón-Díaz, S.; Stasińska, G.
Bibliographical reference
Astronomy and Astrophysics, Volume 526, id.A48
Advertised on:
2
2011
Journal
Citations
76
Refereed citations
69
Description
Aims: We re-examine the recombination/collisional emission line
(RL/CEL) nebular abundance discrepancy problem in the light of recent
high-quality abundance determinations in young stars in the Orion
star-forming region. Methods: We re-evaluate the CEL and RL
abundances of several elements in the Orion nebula and estimate the
associated uncertainties, taking into account the uncertainties in the
ionization correction factors for unseen ions. We estimate the amount of
oxygen trapped in dust grains for several scenarios of dust formation.
We compare the resulting gas+dust nebular abundances with the stellar
abundances of a sample of 13 B-type stars from the Orion star-forming
region (Ori OB1), analyzed in Papers I and III of this series.
Results: We find that the oxygen nebular abundance based on
recombination lines agrees much better with the stellar abundances than
the one derived from the collisionally excited lines. This result calls
for further investigation. If the CEL/RL abundance discrepancy were
caused by temperature fluctuations in the nebula, as argued by some
authors, the same kind of discrepancy should be seen for the other
elements, such as C, N and Ne, which is not what we find in the present
study. Another problem is that with the RL abundances, the energy
balance of the Orion nebula is not well understood. We make some
suggestions concerning the next steps to undertake to solve this
problem.