Single-Star HII Regions as a Probe of Massive Star SEDs

We critically examine stellar atmosphere models by exploiting the strong dependence of HII region optical spectra on the SED of the ionizing source. To accomplish this, we compare spatially resolved, longslit observations of LMC single-star HII regions to photoionization simulations based on observe...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inBulletin de la Société royale des sciences de Liège Vol. 80
Main Authors Jordan Zastrow, M.S. Oey, E.W. Pellegrini
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Université de Liège 01.01.2011
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Summary:We critically examine stellar atmosphere models by exploiting the strong dependence of HII region optical spectra on the SED of the ionizing source. To accomplish this, we compare spatially resolved, longslit observations of LMC single-star HII regions to photoionization simulations based on observed nebular and stellar properties. We select stellar atmosphere models from the CoStar (Schaerer & de Koter, 1997), TLUSTY (Lanz & Hubeny, 2003), WM-basic (Pauldrach et al. 2001) and Smith et. al. (2002) grids to define the ionizing source in our simulations. Gas density fluctuations are necessary to simultaneously fit the emission from high and low excitation ions. We evaluate the atmospheres relative to each other and overall, find atmosphere models using the WM-basic code have the best agreement with our observations.
Bibliography:Volume 80 - Année 2011
450 - 454
ISSN:0037-9565
1783-5720