Carbon Abundances in Starburst Galaxies of the Local Universe
Autor: | Peña-Guerrero, Maria A., Leitherer, Claus, de Mink, Selma, Wofford, Aida, Kewley, Lisa |
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Rok vydání: | 2017 |
Předmět: | |
Druh dokumentu: | Working Paper |
DOI: | 10.3847/1538-4357/aa88bf |
Popis: | The cosmological origin of carbon, the fourth most abundant element in the Universe, is not well known and matter of heavy debate. We investigate the behavior of C/O to O/H in order to constrain the production mechanism of carbon. We measured emission-line intensities in a spectral range from 1600 to 10000 \AA\ on Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) long-slit spectra of 18 starburst galaxies in the local Universe. We determined chemical abundances through traditional nebular analysis and we used a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method to determine where our carbon and oxygen abundances lie in the parameter space. We conclude that our C and O abundance measurements are sensible. We analyzed the behavior of our sample in the [C/O] vs. [O/H] diagram with respect to other objects such as DLAs, neutral ISM measurements, and disk and halo stars, finding that each type of object seems to be located in a specific region of the diagram. Our sample shows a steeper C/O vs. O/H slope with respect to other samples, suggesting that massive stars contribute more to the production of C than N at higher metallicities, only for objects where massive stars are numerous; otherwise intermediate-mass stars dominate the C and N production. Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ |
Databáze: | arXiv |
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