On the Use of the [Zn IV] 3.625 Micron Line as a Tracer of Iron-group Abundances in Ionized Nebulae

Details On the Use of the [Zn IV] 3.625 Micron Line as a Tracer of Iron-group Abundances in Ionized Nebulae On the Use of the [Zn IV] 3.625 Micron Line as a Tracer of Iron-group Abundances in Ionized Nebulae

Dec 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007aas...21110014d&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #211, #100.14; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.913

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

1

Scientific paper

Zinc is the least refractory of all the elements near Fe in the periodic table; consequently, its gas-phase abundance provides a good measurement of the elemental abundance. In addition, although the sites of Zn production are not fully understood, Zn tracks Fe closely in metal-poor stars except at the lowest metallicities. For these reasons, Zn is often employed as an indicator of the abundances of the Fe-peak elements in circumstances where Fe itself cannot be used. Dinerstein & Geballe (2001, ApJ, 562, 515) identified an emission line at 3.625 microns as the ground-state fine-structure transition of Zn+3, and suggested that this line could be used to infer Fe-group abundances in ionized nebulae. The first measurement of this line in an extragalactic source, the planetary nebula LMC SMP 62, was presented by Wood, Dinerstein, & Geballe (2007, BAAS, 210.1506). Using the collisional excitation cross-section computed by Butler (2008, in preparation), we found that Zn/H was only about 15% of the currently accepted solar value of 4 x 10-8, although alpha elements such as Ne, Ar, and S are considerably more abundant in this object (about 1/3 solar). This suggests that the Fe-group elements are more deficient than the alpha species, a characteristic of many metal-poor stars in the Milky Way. However, it is essential to calibrate this result by observing a control sample. In this poster, we report measurements of [Zn IV] 3.625 microns and adjacent H I lines in nine Galactic disk and bulge planetary nebulae, using Gemini South and the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT). We find that the Milky Way objects also tend to show subsolar Zn/H, and discuss the possible origins of this offset.
This research was supported by NSF grants AST 0408609 and 0708245. The UKIRT data were obtained through the Service Observing Program.

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