A VLT study of metal-rich extragalactic H II regions - I. Observations and empirical abundances

By F. Bresolin, Daniel Schaerer, R. Delgado, G. Stasińska. 2005

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We have obtained spectroscopic observations from 3600 Ato 9200 Awith FORS at the Very Large Telescope for approximately 70 H iiregions located in the spiral galaxies NGC 1232, NGC 1365, NGC 2903, NGC 2997 and NGC 5236. These data are part of a project to measure the chemical abundances and characterize the massive stellar content of metal-rich extragalactic H iiregions. In this paper we describe our dataset, and present emission line fluxes for the whole sample. In 32 H iiregions we measure at least one of the following auroral lines: [S ii]$\,\lambda$4072, [N ii]$\,\lambda$5755, [S iii]$\,\lambda$6312 and [O ii]$\,\lambda$7325. From these we derive electron temperatures, as well as oxygen, nitrogen and sulphur abundances, using classical empirical methods (both so-called “ T e -based methods” and “strong line methods”). Under the assumption that the temperature does not introduce severe biases, we find that the most metal-rich nebulae with detected auroral lines are found at 12 + log(O/H) $\simeq$ 8.9, i.e. about 60% larger than the adopted solar value. However, classical abundance determinations in metal-rich H iiregions may be severely biased and must be tested with realistic photoionization models. The spectroscopic observations presented in this paper will serve as a homogeneous and high-quality database for such purposes.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/84a4607b3839a0cb189aeb479616351750dae54d

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Citations in the corpus

New fully empirical calibrations of strong-line metallicity indicators in star forming galaxies (2016, background): “…of similar temperatures discrepancies have been reported by several works in the literature aimed at studying the physical properties of single Hii regions (see e.g. Kennicutt et al. 2003; Bresolin et al. 2005; Esteban et al. 2009; Pilyugin et al. 2009; Binette et al. 2012; Berg et al. 2015).”
EXTRAGALACTIC CHEMICAL ABUNDANCES: DO H ii REGIONS AND YOUNG STARS TELL THE SAME STORY? THE CASE OF THE SPIRAL GALAXY NGC 300 (2009, methodology): “…and [N II]λ5575, can be carried out to by-pass these calibration issues, in order to have a ‘direct’ measurement of the chemical abundances from the knowledge of the electron temperature Te, as done recently by our group (Kennicutt et al. 2003; Garnett et al. 2004; Bresolin et al. 2004, 2005).”
METALLICITY GRADIENTS AND GAS FLOWS IN GALAXY PAIRS (2010, methodology): “…the H II region metallicities in the isolated spiral galaxies using the Kewley & Dopita (2002) [N II]/[O II] and McGaugh (1991) calibrations using the H II region emission-line fluxes from Shaver et al. (1983) [Milky Way], Kennicutt et al. (2003) [M101], and Bresolin et al. (2005, 2009) [M83].”
The impact of the nitrogen-to-oxygen ratio on ionized nebula diagnostics based on [N ii] emission lines (2009, background): “For the same metallicity, some HII regions in spirals show very high values of the N/O ratio but, in this case, Bresolin et al. (2005) claim that the N abundances determined from the [Nii] auroral line are not very reliable.”
Semi‐empirical analysis of Sloan Digital Sky Survey galaxies – III. How to distinguish AGN hosts (2006, background): “The observed trends at metallicities above 0.65 Z (Pilyugin, Thuan & Vı́lchez 2003; Bresolin et al. 2005) are clearly of an increase of N/O with O/H.”
THE MASS–METALLICITY RELATION WITH THE DIRECT METHOD ON STACKED SPECTRA OF SDSS GALAXIES (2012, background): “Because the strength of the auroral lines, especially [O iii] λ4363, is a 4 The original data can be found in Bresolin et al. (2004, 2005, 2009a, 2009b), Bresolin (2007), Campbell et al. (1986), Castellanos et al. (2002), de Blok & van der Hulst (1998), Esteban et al. (2009), Fierro et al. (1986),…”
OPTICAL SPECTROSCOPY AND NEBULAR OXYGEN ABUNDANCES OF THE SPITZER/SINGS GALAXIES (2010, background): “…generally yield oxygen abundances that are factors of 1.5–5 lower than abundances derived using theoretical calibrations (Kennicutt et al. 2003a; Garnett et al. 2004b; Bresolin et al. 2004, 2005; Shi et al. 2006; Nagao et al. 2006; Liang et al. 2006; Yin et al. 2007; Kewley & Ellison 2008).”
KECK HIRES SPECTROSCOPY OF EXTRAGALACTIC H ii REGIONS: C AND O ABUNDANCES FROM RECOMBINATION LINES (2009, result): “A very deep spectrum of the center of M83 has been obtained by Bresolin et al. (2005), who determine electron temperatures from more emission-line ratios than in this study.”
Eliminating error in the chemical abundance scale for extragalactic H ii regions (2012, unknown): “We adopted the ICF given by Stasińska (1978), which is based on photoionization models of H ii regions and is expressed as a function of the O+/O ratio.”
The Mass-Metallicity Relation at z≳2 (2006, methodology): “These new data suggest that the most widely used indicator, R23 ≡ ([O II]λ3727+[O III]λλ4959, 5007)/Hβ, may systematically overestimate metallicities in the high-abundance regime (Z & Z⊙) by as much as 0.2–0.5 dex (Kennicutt et al. 2003; Garnett et al. 2004; Bresolin et al. 2005).”
Gas metallicity diagnostics in star-forming galaxies (2006, background): “…with the previous studies on the empirical relation between R23 and the oxygen abundance based on smaller samples of observational data (e.g., Edmunds & Pagel 1984; McGaugh 1991; Miller & Hodge 1996; Castellanos et al. 2002; Lee et al. 2003a; Bresolin et al. 2004, 2005; Pilyugin & Thuan 2005).”