Chemical abundances and temperature structure of H II regions

Abstract

We use a sample of 37 H II regions with high quality spectra to study the behavior of the relative abundances of several elements as a function of metallicity. The sample includes spectra for eight H II regions of the Magellanic Clouds, obtained with UVES/VLT; the rest are gathered from the literature. We find that if we use the traditional twozone scheme of temperature for the observed ions, the S/O, Cl/O and Ar/O abundance ratios increase with metallicity. However, with slight changes in the temperature structure, which include the use of intermediate temperatures, these ratios are constant with metallicity, as expected. Therefore, high quality observations allow us to deepen our understanding of the temperature structure of H II regions.