Neon and sulfur abundances of planetary nebulae in the Magellanic Clouds
Abstract
The chemical abundances of neon and sulfur for 25 planetary nebulae (PNe) in the Magellanic Clouds are presented. These abundances have been derived using mainly infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope. The implications for the chemical evolution of these elements are discussed. A comparison with similarly obtained abundances of Galactic PNe and H II regions and Magellanic Cloud H II regions is also given. The average neon abundances are 6.0 X 10^(-5) and 2.7 X 10^(-5) for the PNe in the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, respectively. These are ~1/3 and 1/6 of the average abundances of Galactic planetary nebulae to which we compare. The average sulfur abundances for the LMC and SMC are, respectively, 2.7 X 10^(-6) and 1.0 X 10^(-6). The Ne/S ratio (23.5) is on average higher than the ratio found in Galactic PNe (16), but the range of values in both data sets is similar for most of the objects. The neon abundances found in PNe and H II regions agree with each other. It is possible that a few (3-4) of the PNe in the sample have experienced some neon enrichment, but for two of these objects the high Ne/S ratio can be explained by their very low sulfur abundances. The neon and sulfur abundances derived in this paper are also compared to previously published abundances using optical data and photoionization models.
Additional Information
© 2008. Received 2007 January 31, accepted for publication 2007 September 9. We thank an anonymous referee whose comments have improved the paper. J. B. S. would like to thank Duncan Farrah for reading parts of the manuscript. This work is based on observations made with the Spitzer Space Telescope, which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology under NASA contract 1407. Support for this work was provided by NASA through contract number 1257184 issued by JPL/Caltech.Attached Files
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 13703
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:BERapj08
- 1407
- NASA
- 1257184
- NASA
- Created
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2009-07-15Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-08Created from EPrint's last_modified field