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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 August 2018

Dana S. Balser
Affiliation:
National Radio Astronomy Observatory, 520 Edgemont Road, Charlottesville, VA 22903-2475, USA
Trey V. Wenger
Affiliation:
National Radio Astronomy Observatory, 520 Edgemont Road, Charlottesville, VA 22903-2475, USA Astronomy Department, University of Virginia, P.O. Box 400325, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4325, USA
T. M. Bania
Affiliation:
Department of Astronomy, Boston University 725 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215, USA
L. D. Anderson
Affiliation:
Department of Physics and Astronomy, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506, USA
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Abstract

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Hii 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.

Type
Contributed Papers
Copyright
Copyright © International Astronomical Union 2018 

References

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