Abstract
There is evidence for temperature fluctuations in Planetary Nebulae and in some Galactic H II regions. If such fluctuations occur in the low metallicity, extragalactic H II regions used to probe the primordial helium abundance, the derived 4He mass fraction, YP, could be systematically different from the true primordial value. Although this effect could be large, there are no data which allow us to estimate the size of the temperature fluctuations for the extragalactic H II regions. Therefore, we have explored this effect via Monte Carlo simulations of the data in which the abundances derived from a fiducial data set are modified by ΔT chosen from a distribution with 0 ≤ ΔT ≤ ΔTmax where ΔTmax is varied from 500 K to 4000 K.
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Steigman, G., Viegas, S.M. & Gruenwald, R. Temperature Fluctuations, H II Region Abundances, and Primordial Helium. Space Science Reviews 84, 95–103 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005042512529
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005042512529