Bibcode
Nemer, A.; Loch, Stuart; Sterling, Nicholas; Raymond, John; García-Rojas, J.
Bibliographical reference
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #233, id.#251.02
Advertised on:
1
2019
Citations
0
Refereed citations
0
Description
There are two main types of photoionized gaseous nebulae that exist in
the universe: H II regions and Planetary Nebulae (PNe). They mark the
endpoints of stellar evolution and understanding their composition will
lead to a better understanding of stellar evolution processes and
galactic chemical nucleosynthesis. Elemental abundances are estimated
through photo-ionization codes that include all relevant atomic
processes for the plasma. Robicheaux et al. proposed that the mechanism
of Dielectronic Recombination (DR) which typically occurs in plasma
through free electrons would extend to Rydberg states transitioning to
below threshold doubly excited states. If enough Rydberg states overlap
with the below threshold excited states, then we expect a transition
between them, very similar to DR; we call this process Rydberg Enhanced
Recombination (RER) and it is currently not considered in modeling
codes. Furthermore, it is challenging to prepare an experiment for
testing RER in a lab. We investigate the implications of this new
process, while also searching for observational evidence of the
mechanism in astrophysical spectra. We have identified many ions that
should experience RER in low temperature environments, however most of
their strong emission lines are in the UV. In the case of CII, one of
the terms affected by RER will have emission in the optical. In this
work we present the first evidence of RER through observed optical
spectra from seven PNe. We found that 2 specific lines for CII which
could have RER contributions were consistently detected in all PNe.
After rigorously confirming their identifications, we checked for other
mechanisms competing with RER to populate these lines. We found that
cascade transitions from above to these levels is also likely in these
PNe. We then simulated some of the observed PNe using the Cloudy
radiation transport code. We found that the emission lines are populated
by both cascades and RER, confirming the existence of the RER mechanism
such plasmas. We also use Cloudy simulations to investigate the effects
of RER on charge state balance and temperature in PNe