Related papers: Independent Emission and Absorption Abundances for…
Recent analyses of nebular spectra have resulted in discrepant abundances from CNO forbidden and recombination lines. We consider independent methods of determining ion abundances for emission nebulae, comparing ion emission measures with…
Recombination lines (RLs) of C II, N II, and O II in planetary nebulae (PNs) have been found to give abundances that are much larger in some cases than abundances from collisionally-excited forbidden lines (CELs). The origins of this…
Since the last IAU symposium on planetary nebulae (PNe), several deep spectroscopic surveys of the relatively faint optical recombination lines (ORLs) emitted by heavy element ions in PNe and H II regions have been completed. New diagnostic…
[Abridged] Deep optical observations of the spectra of 12 Galactic planetary nebulae (PNe) and 3 Magellanic Cloud PNe were presented in Paper I by Tsamis et al. (2003b), who carried out an abundance analysis using the collisionally excited…
The predicted emission spectrum of NII is compared with observations of permitted lines in the Orion nebula. Conventional nebular models show that the intensities of the more intense lines can be explained by fluorescence of starlight…
I explore the effects of observational errors on nebular chemical abundances using a sample of 179 optical spectra of 42 planetary nebulae (PNe) observed by different authors. The spectra are analysed in a homogeneous way to derive physical…
We present new observations of O II recombination lines in ten bright planetary nebulae, along with spatially-resolved measurements of O II and [O III] in the Ring nebula NGC 6720, to study the discrepancy between abundances derived from O…
It has recently been noted that there seems to be a strong correlation between planetary nebulae with close binary central stars, and highly enhanced recombination line abundances. We present new deep spectra of seven objects known to have…
The central stars of planetary nebulae (PNe) are natural targets for FUSE due to their UV brightness. The FUSE spectra of many PNe show absorption features due to circumstellar material in species ranging from H_2 and neutrals in the…
This paper is the third in a series reporting on a study of carbon abundances in a carefully chosen sample of planetary nebulae representing a large range in progenitor mass and metallicity. We make use of the IUE Final Archive database…
The discrepancy between abundances computed using optical recombination lines (ORLs) and collisionally excited lines (CELs) is a major, unresolved problem with significant implications for the determination of chemical abundances throughout…
Ionized nebulae are key to understanding the chemical composition and evolution of the Universe. Among these nebulae, H~{\sc ii} regions and planetary nebulae are particularly important as they provide insights into the present and past…
We present high signal-to-noise echelle spectra of the compact high surface brightness, low ionization planetary nebula IC 418. These reveal 807 emission lines down to intensities less than 10$^{-5}$ that of H$\beta$ for which we determine…
We have carried out optical spectroscopic measurements of emission lines for a sample of Galactic planetary nebulae with Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars and weak emission-line stars (wels). The plasma diagnostics and elemental abundance analysis have…
The determination of the heavy element abundances from giant extragalactic H II regions has been generally based on collisionally excited lines. We will discuss the reasons to study the characteristics of recombination lines, and then use…
We present an analysis of physical conditions in planetary nebulae (PNe) in terms of collisionally-excited line (CEL) and optical-recombination line (ORL) profiles. We aim to investigate whether line profiles could be used to study the…
We present VLT UVES echelle spectrophotometry of the Orion nebula in the 3100 to 10400 A range. We have measured the intensity of 555 emission lines, many of them corresponding to permitted lines of different heavy-element ions. This is the…
Based on high quality observations of multiplet V1 of OII and the NLTE atomic computations for OII we study the density and temperature of a sample of PNe. We find that, in general, the densities derived from recombination lines of OII are…
We present a homogeneous analysis of the oxygen abundance in five H II regions and eight planetary nebulae (PNe) located at distances lower than 2 kpc and with available spectra of high quality. We find that both the collisionally excited…
We present MUSE deep integral-field unit spectroscopy of three planetary nebulae(PNe) with high abundance discrepancy factors (ADF > 20): NGC 6778, M 1-42 and Hf 2-2. We have constructed flux maps for more than 40 emission lines, and use…