Modeling ionized gas in low-metallicity environments: the Local Group dwarf galaxy IC10

TL;DR

This study models the ionized gas in the low-metallicity dwarf galaxy IC 10 across various spatial scales, revealing uniform physical properties and photon leakage, with most emission from neutral gas rather than ionized regions.

Contribution

It combines infrared line observations with photoionization modeling to characterize the physical conditions and photon leakage in IC 10's ionized gas at multiple scales, highlighting the matter-bounded nature of the regions.

Findings

Most clumps have similar density and ionization parameters.

All regions are matter-bounded, allowing photon leakage.

Most emission lines originate from neutral gas, not ionized gas.

Abstract

Our objective is to investigate the physical properties of the ionised gas of the low-metallicity dwarf galaxy, IC 10, at various spatial scales: from individual HII regions to the entire galaxy scale and examine whether diagnostics for integrated measurements introduce bias in the results. We modeled the ionised gas combining the mid- and far-infrared fine-structure cooling lines observed with Spitzer/IRS and Herschel/PACS, with the photoionisation code Cloudy. The free parameters of the models are the age of the stellar cluster, the density and the ionisation parameter of the ionised gas as well as the depth of the cloud. The latter is used to investigate the leakage of the ionising photons from the analysed regions of IC 10. We investigate HII regions in the main star-forming body, on scales of ~25 pc, three in the main star-forming region in the center of the galaxy and two on the first arc. We then consider larger sizes on the scale of ~200 pc. We find that most clumps have nearly identical properties, density ~10$^{2.} $ - 10$^{2.6}$ cm$^{-3}$, ionisation parameter between 10$^{-2.2}$ and 10$^{-1.6}$ and age of the stellar cluster ~5.5 Myr. All of them are matter-bounded regions, allowing ionising photons to leak. The relatively uniform physical properties of the clumps suggest a common origin for their star formation activity, which could be related to the feedback from stellar winds or supernovae of a previous generation of stars. The properties derived for ~200 pc size "zones" have similar properties as the HII regions they encompass, but with the larger regions tending to be more radiation-bounded. Finally, we investigate the fraction of [CII] 157.7 {\mu}m, [SiII] 34.8 {\mu}m, and [FeII] 25.9 {\mu}m, emission arising from the ionised gas phase and we find that most of the emission originates from the neutral gas, not from the ionised gas.