| Description |
Galactic abundances trace the processing of primordial elements bystars from the birth of the Milky Way to the present day. HIIregions, because of their short lifetimes, are ideal targets forabundance determinations because they sample the current state of theinterstellar medium. We propose to observe the OIII, NIII, andNII lines of 31 well-studied Galactic HII regions with the PACSspectrometer to derive the oxygen and nitrogen abundances. We hope toaddress two long-standing problems in Galactic abundance measurements:1) abundances traced in the far-infrared show discrepancies with thosein the optical, and 2) HII region electron temperatures derived fromradio observations, which can be used as a proxy for metallicity, arenot well calibrated with abundance measurements. |
| Keywords |
Herschel Space Observatory data, ESA Herschel mission dataset, far-infrared astronomy observations, submillimeter astronomy data, infrared space telescope observations, PACS photometer data, PACS spectrometer data, SPIRE photometer data, SPIRE Fourier transform spectrometer data, HIFI heterodyne spectroscopy data, far-infrared spectroscopy dataset, submillimeter spectral line observations, cold universe observations dataset, star formation infrared data, molecular cloud far-infrared observations, interstellar medium spectroscopy data, protoplanetary disk infrared observations, galaxy evolution far-infrared data, dust emission submillimeter observations, cosmic infrared background measurements, extragalactic infrared survey data, calibrated level 2 data products, FITS files astronomy, spectral cubes far-infrared, flux-calibrated maps, continuum photometry data, spectral energy distribution measurements, ESA Herschel Science Archive data |
