Bibcode
Luridiana, Valentina
Bibliographical reference
Astrophysics and Space Science, Volume 324, Issue 2-4, pp. 361-365
Advertised on:
12
2009
Journal
Citations
8
Refereed citations
7
Description
Collisional excitation of neutral hydrogen atoms can significantly
increase the intensity of Balmer lines with respect to pure
recombination. If this effect is not taken into account, the abundance
analysis of these objects returns biased values, and the bias may be
significant if accuracies better than a few percent are required. The
most affected objects are young, metal-poor H ii regions, due to their
comparatively high temperatures. To date, estimates of collisional
enhancement have been based on tailored modeling of individual H ii
regions. In this contribution, I describe an ongoing effort to develop a
general calibration suitable for application to large samples of
objects. Emphasis is placed on the uncertainties affecting the resulting
predictions.