Constraints on the properties of warm ionized gas from low-frequency hydrogen radio recombination lines

Abstract

The ionized gas in the Milky Way is a major component of the interstellar medium. Observations of extinction free tracers, such as hydrogen radio recombination lines (HRRLs), have revealed the presence of a dense (electron density 1 to 100 cm$^{-3}$) warm ionized medium. Motivated by advances in radio instrumentation, the existence of fully sampled HRRL maps, and a better knowledge about the population of discrete HII regions in our Galaxy, we have acquired new low-frequency ($ν\lesssim1$ GHz) observations of HRRLs to characterize the properties of this gas. We target three positions in the Galactic plane, with few or no known HII regions, using the 342 MHz and 800 MHz feeds of the Green Bank Telescope. We detect HRRL emission from all three positions. We combine these with the fully sampled HRRL 5.8 GHz cubes from the GBT Diffuse Ionized Gas Survey (GDIGS) to determine the gas properties using a forward modeling approach. From our analysis we find electron densities between 6 and 15 cm$^{-3}$, and that to determine the gas temperature and emission measure we require informative priors or higher signal-to-noise observations.