Analytic Estimates of the Effect of Plasma Density Fluctuations on HII Region Density Diagnostics

TL;DR

This paper analytically examines how plasma density fluctuations affect spectroscopic diagnostics in HII regions, supporting numerical studies and showing that fluctuations lead to higher inferred densities than uniform models.

Contribution

It provides an analytic framework for understanding plasma density fluctuation effects on nebular diagnostics, confirming numerical results for exponential density distributions.

Findings

Density fluctuations cause higher density estimates from line ratios.

Results support the numerical study by Bergerud et al (2019).

Analytic approach corroborates previous numerical findings.

Abstract

An analytic calculation is made of the effect of plasma density fluctuations on some spectroscopic diagnostics commonly used in the study of HII regions and planetary nebulae. To permit an analytic treatment, attention is restricted to the case of density fluctuations possessing an exponential probability distribution function (pdf). The present investigation is made in support of a completely numerical and more extensive study of nebular diagnostics by Bergerud et al (2019). Results from this paper are presented in terms of graphs of the observed quantity (spectroscopic line ratio) versus mean nebular density. Our results yield a higher density estimate, given the same observed line ratio, for the case of a nebula with density fluctuations than for the case of a nebula with uniform density. This is qualitatively consistent with the typically observed case, in which the observations lead to the inference of a filling factor < 1. Our results are in quantitative agreement with those of Bergerud et al (2019), and thus corroborate those calculations for the case of an exponential pdf.