The underlying stellar absorption contribution to the primordial helium abundance determination

TL;DR

This study assesses how underlying stellar absorption affects the accuracy of primordial helium abundance measurements, highlighting the importance of accounting for this factor to reduce uncertainties.

Contribution

It introduces an analysis using stellar population models and observational data to quantify the impact of stellar absorption on helium abundance estimates.

Findings

Stellar absorption contributes significantly to the uncertainty in helium abundance.

Neglecting stellar absorption leads to underestimating the error margins.

The analysis establishes a lower limit to the error when stellar absorption is ignored.

Abstract

We carried out an exploratory analysis of the contribution of the underlying stellar absorption to the total uncertainty of the abundance of primordial helium using simple stellar populations models and observational data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Results indicate that our analysis yields a lower limit to the error on the helium abundance determination if the stellar absorption is neglected.