Determining electron temperature and density in a H II region by using the relative strengths of hydrogen radio recombination lines

TL;DR

This paper presents a new method for estimating electron temperature and density in H II regions using hydrogen radio recombination lines from single dish observations, achieving reasonable accuracy without interferometers.

Contribution

The authors introduce a novel approach that estimates H II region properties from recombination lines alone, independent of radio continuum data, with validated reliability through hydrodynamical models.

Findings

Estimated temperature error < 13%

Estimated density error < 25%

Accuracy improves with lower line flux uncertainties

Abstract

We have introduced a new method of estimating the electron temperature and density of H II regions by using single dish observations. In this method, multiple hydrogen radio recombination lines of different bands are computed under the assumption of low optical depth. We use evolutionary hydrodynamical models of H II regions to model hydrogen recombination line emission from a variety of H II regions and assess the reliability of the method. According to the simulated results, the error of the estimated temperature is commonly < 13%, and that of the estimated density is < 25% for a < 1% uncertainty of the observed line fluxes. A reasonable estimated value of electron density can be achieved if the uncertainty of the line fluxes are lower than 3%. In addition, the estimated values are more representative of the properties in the relatively high-density region if the gas density gradient is present in the H II region. Our method can be independent of the radio continuum observations. But the accuracy will be improved if a line-to-continuum ratio at millimeter wavelengths is added to the estimation. Our method provides a way to measure the temperature and density in ionized regions without interferometers.