3-He in the Milky Way Interstellar Medium: Ionization Structure

TL;DR

This paper investigates the ionization correction needed to accurately determine the 3-He/H abundance ratio in Milky Way interstellar regions using hyperfine transition measurements, highlighting the effects of nebular ionization structure.

Contribution

It introduces a simple ionization correction method based on radio recombination lines and models to improve 3-He/H abundance estimates in astrophysical nebulae.

Findings

Ionization correction factors range from 1 to 1.8 across models.

Most sources require only modest correction, less than a factor of 2.

Large corrections are unlikely without specific density-ionization structure coincidences.

Abstract

The cosmic abundance of the 3-He isotope has important implications for many fields of astrophysics. We are using the 8.665 GHz hyperfine transition of 3-He+ to determine the 3-He/H abundance in Milky Way HII regions and planetary nebulae. This is one in a series of papers in which we discuss issues involved in deriving accurate 3-He/H abundance ratios from the available measurements. Here we describe the ionization correction we use to convert the 3-He+/H+ abundance, y3+, to the 3-He/H abundance, y3. In principle the nebular ionization structure can significantly influence the y3 derived for individual sources. We find that in general there is insufficient information available to make a detailed ionization correction. Here we make a simple correction and assess its validity. The correction is based on radio recombination line measurements of H+ and 4-He+, together with simple core-halo source models. We use these models to establish criteria that allow us to identify sources that can be accurately corrected for ionization and those that cannot. We argue that this effect cannot be very large for most of the sources in our observational sample. For a wide range of models of nebular ionization structure we find that the ionization correction factor varies from 1 to 1.8. Although large corrections are possible, there would have to be a conspiracy between the density and ionization structure for us to underestimate the ionization correction by a substantial amount.