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Cambridge University Press (CUP), Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union, S334(13), p. 275-276

DOI: 10.1017/s1743921317007530

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Metallicity Structure across the Galactic Disk: Radio Observations of H ii Regions

Journal article published in 2017 by Dana S. Balser, Trey V. Wenger ORCID, T. M. Bania, L. D. Anderson
This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.
This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.

Full text: Unavailable

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Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

AbstractHii regions are the sites of massive star formation and are the archetypal tracers of spiral arms. Because of their short lifetimes (<10 Myr) their abundances provide a measure of the nuclear processing of many stellar generations. Here we review our ongoing efforts to explore the metallicity structure of the Galactic disk by observing radio recombination line (RRL) and thermal radio continuum emission toward Hii regions. The RRL-to-continuum ratio provides an accurate measure of the electron temperature which is used as a proxy for metallicity. Since collisionally excited lines from metals (e.g., O, C) are the main coolant in Hii regions, the thermal electron temperature is well correlated with metallicity (e.g., [O/H]). We determine Hii region distances from maser parallax measurements when possible; otherwise we use kinematic distances. Such radio diagnostics of Hii regions yield an extinction free tracer to map the metallicity distribution across the entire Galactic disk.

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