English

Effective temperature of ionizing stars of extragalactic HII regions -- II: nebular parameter relations based on CALIFA data

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2018-12-19 v2

Abstract

We calculate the effective temperature (TeffT_{\rm eff}) of ionizing star(s), oxygen abundance of the gas phase (O/H)(\rm O/H), and the ionization parameter UU for a sample of H\,{\sc ii} regions located in the disks of 59 spiral galaxies in the 0.005 < z < 0.03 redshift range. We use spectroscopic data taken from the CALIFA data release 3 (DR3) and theoretical (for TeffT_{\rm eff} and UU) and empirical (for O/H) calibrations based on strong emission-lines. We consider spatial distribution and radial gradients of those parameters in each galactic disk for the objects in our sample. Most of the galaxies in our sample (70\sim70 \%) shows positive TeffT_{\rm eff} radial gradients even though some them exhibit negative or flat ones. The median value of the TeffT_{\rm eff} radial gradient is 0.762 kK/R25R_{25}. We find that radial gradients of both logU\log U and TeffT_{\rm eff} depend on the oxygen abundance gradient, in the sense that the gradient of logU\log U increases as log(O/H)\log(\rm O/H) gradient increases while there is an anti-correlation between the gradient of TeffT_{\rm eff} and the oxygen abundance gradient. Moreover, galaxies with flat oxygen abundance gradients tend to have flat logU\log U and TeffT_{\rm eff} gradients as well. Although our results are in agreement with the idea of the existence of positive TeffT_{\rm eff} gradients along the disk of the majority of spiral galaxies, this seems not to be an universal property for these objects.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1810.09018,
  title  = {Effective temperature of ionizing stars of extragalactic HII regions -- II: nebular parameter relations based on CALIFA data},
  author = {I. A. Zinchenko and O. L. Dors and G. F. Hagele and M. V. Cardaci and A. C. Krabbe},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.09018},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

11 pages, 11 figures; accepted for publication in MNRAS