Photoionized Herbig-Haro objects in the Orion Nebula through deep high-spectral resolution spectroscopy II: HH204

Abstract

We analyze the physical conditions, chemical composition and other properties of the photoionized Herbig-Haro object HH~204 through Very Large Telescope (VLT) echelle spectroscopy and Hubble Space Telescope (\textit{HST}) imaging. We kinematically isolate the high-velocity emission of HH~204 from the emission of the background nebula and study the sub-arcsecond distribution of physical conditions and ionic abundances across the HH object. We find that low and intermediate-ionization emission arises exclusively from gas at photoionization equilibrium temperatures, whereas the weak high-ionization emission from HH~204 shows a significant contribution from higher temperature shock-excited gas. We derive separately the ionic abundances of HH~204, the emission of the Orion Nebula and the fainter Diffuse Blue Layer.In HH~204, the O$^{+}$ abundance determined from Collisional Excited Lines (CELs) matches the one based on Recombination Lines (RLs), while the O$^{2+}$ abundance is very low, so that the oxygen abundance discrepancy is zero. The ionic abundances of Ni and Fe in HH~204 have similar ionization and depletion patterns, with total abundances that are a factor of 3.5 higher than in the rest of the Orion Nebula due to dust destruction in the bowshock. We show that a failure to resolve the kinematic components in our spectra would lead to significant error in the determination of chemical abundances (for instance, 40\% underestimate of O), mainly due to incorrect estimation of the electron density.