Bibcode
Rodríguez, Mónica; García-Rojas, J.
Referencia bibliográfica
The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 708, Issue 2, pp. 1551-1559 (2010).
Fecha de publicación:
1
2010
Revista
Número de citas
20
Número de citas referidas
15
Descripción
The metallicities implied by collisionally excited lines (CELs) of heavy
elements in H II regions are systematically lower than those implied by
recombination lines (RLs) by factors of ~2, introducing uncertainties of
the same order in the metallicities inferred for the interstellar medium
of any star-forming galaxy. Most explanations of this discrepancy are
based on the different sensitivities of CELs and RLs to electron
temperature, and invoke either some extra heating mechanism producing
temperature fluctuations in the ionized region or the addition of cold
gas in metal-rich inclusions or ionized by cosmic rays or X-rays. These
explanations will change the temperature structure of the ionized gas
from the one predicted by simple photoionization models, and depending
on which one is correct, will imply different metallicities for the
emitting gas. We select nine H II regions with observed spectra of high
quality and show that simple models with metallicities close to the ones
implied by oxygen CELs reproduce easily their temperature structure,
measured with T e([N II])/T e([O III]), and their
oxygen CELs emission. We discuss the strong constraints that this
agreement places on the possible explanations of the discrepancy and
suggest that the simplest explanation, namely errors in the line
recombination coefficients by factors ~2, might be the correct one. In
such case, CELs will provide the best estimates of metallicity.
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