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. |