Measuring Chemical Abundances in Extragalactic Metal-Rich HII Regions
Abstract
Description
The analysis of metal-rich HII regions has a profound impact on the calibration of abundance diagnostics widely used to measure the chemical content of star-forming galaxies, both locally and at high redshift. I review the main difficulties that affect direct abundance determinations from temperature-sensitive collisionally excited lines, and briefly discuss strong-line methods, in particular their empirical calibration. In the near future it will be possible to calibrate strong-line methods using metal recombination lines, providing abundances that are virtually insensitive to uncertainties on the nebular temperature structure.
10 pages, 3 figures. Review paper, "The Metal-Rich Universe", (La Palma, June 2006), eds. G. Israelian and G. Meynet (Cambridge Univ. Press)
10 pages, 3 figures. Review paper, "The Metal-Rich Universe", (La Palma, June 2006), eds. G. Israelian and G. Meynet (Cambridge Univ. Press)