Bibcode
Beckman, J. E.; Giammanco, C.; Zurita, A.; Relaño, M.
Bibliographical reference
II International GTC Workshop: Science with GTC 1st-light Instruments and the LMT (Eds. A. M. Hidalgo-Gámez, J. J. González, J. M. Rodríguez Espinosa, and S. Torres-Peimbert) Revista Mexicana de Astronomía y Astrofísica (Serie de Conferencias) Vol. 24, pp. 78-81 (2005) (http://www.astroscu.unam.mx/~rmaa/)
Advertised on:
12
2005
Citations
0
Refereed citations
0
Description
It is well known that when measuring electron densities in H II regions
locally via emission line ratios the values observed are 100cm-3, but
gobal values obtained via emission measure using surface brightness as
the observed parameter are ~1cm-3. This difference is attributable to
density fluctuations,and traditional models for these is the ``Filling
factor (FF)'' model, of Osterbrock and Flather. Implicit in this model
is the optical thinness of the fluctuations. We show here that if these
fluctuations are optically thick the diagnostic diagrams which are used
to find parameters, notably abundances, will be significantly affected.
We present observational arguments supporting these ``clumpy'' models,
and outline some initial results of their use.