A Chandra Study of the Interstellar Metallicity in the Large Magellanic Cloud Using Supernova Remnants

TL;DR

This study uses archival Chandra data of sixteen supernova remnants in the Large Magellanic Cloud to measure interstellar medium abundances of key elements, providing updated and more precise metallicity estimates compared to previous studies.

Contribution

It presents the first comprehensive LMC ISM abundance measurements based on modern Chandra data, improving accuracy over earlier ASCA-based estimates and analyzing discrepancies.

Findings

Measured lower elemental abundances than previous studies.

Provided tight constraints on LMC ISM metallicities.

Discussed discrepancies between Chandra and ASCA measurements.

Abstract

We report on the results from our measurements of the interstellar medium (ISM) abundances for the elements O, Ne, Mg, Si, and Fe in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). We used the archival Chandra data for sixteen supernova remnants (SNRs) in the LMC (0453--68.5, DEM L71, N23, 0519--69.0, N49B, N132D, N49, N206, 0534--69.9, DEM L238, N63A, Honeycomb, N157B, 0540--69.3, DEM L316B, and 0548--70.4). Our results represent LMC abundance measurements based on the modern Chandra data. We place tight constraints on our measured elemental abundances and find lower abundances than previous measurements by Hughes et al. (1998) (by a factor of ~2 on average except for Si) who utilized similar methods based on a smaller sample of ASCA data of SNRs in the LMC. We discuss origins of the discrepancy between our Chandra and the previous ASCA measurements. We also discuss our results in comparisons with the LMC abundance measurements in literatures.