We derive the Mg/H ratio in the Orion nebula and in 30 Doradus. We also derive the O/H and the Fe/O ratios in the extremely metal poor galaxy SBS 0335-052. We estimate the dust depletions of Mg, Si, and Fe in Galactic and extragalactic H II regions. Based on these depletions we estimate the fraction of O atoms embedded in dust as a function of the O/H ratio. We find an increasing depletion of O with increasing O/H. The O depletion increases from about 0.08 dex, for the metal poorest H II regions known, to about 0.12 dex, for metal rich H II regions. This depletion has to be considered when comparing nebular with stellar abundances.
Extragalactic astronomy relies on the accurate estimation of source photometry corrected for Milky Way dust extinction. This has motivated the creation of a number of "Galactic" dust maps. We investigate whether these maps are contaminated by extragalactic signals using the clustering-redshift technique, i.e., by measuring a set of angular cross-correlations with spectroscopic objects as a function of redshift. Our tomographic analysis reveals imprints of extragalactic large-scale structure patterns in nine out of 10 Galactic dust maps, including all infrared-based maps as well as "stellar" re…
We present an updated model for the extragalactic background light (EBL) from stars and dust, over wavelengths approximately 0.1 to 1000 $μ$m. This model uses accurate theoretical stellar spectra, and tracks the evolution of star formation, stellar mass density, metallicity, and interstellar dust extinction and emission in the universe with redshift. Dust emission components are treated self-consistently, with stellar light absorbed by dust reradiated in the infrared as three blackbody components. We fit our model, with free parameters associated with star formation rate and dust extinction an…
The relationships between atomic and molecular hydrogen and dust of various sizes in extragalactic star-forming regions are considered, based on observational data from the Spitzer and Herschel infrared space telescopes, the Very Large Array (atomic hydrogen emission) and IRAM (CO emission). The source sample consists of approximately 300 star-forming regions in 11 nearby galaxies. Aperture photometry has been applied to measure the fluxes in eight infrared bands (3.6, 4.5, 5.8, 8, 24, 70, 100, and 160$μ$m), the atomic hydrogen (21cm) line and CO (2--1) lines. The parameters of the dust in the…
Extragalactic Planetary Nebulae (xPNe). Chemical evolution and assembly histories of nearby galaxies using Oxygen and Argon abundances. From the local universe to cosmic dawn
We predict how the C, N, and O abundances within the interstellar medium of galaxies evolve as functions of the galaxy star formation history (SFH). We adopt a hydrodynamical cosmological simulation, focusing on three star-forming disc galaxies with different SFHs. By assuming failed supernovae, we can predict an increasing trend of the gas-phase N/O--O/H abundance diagram, which was not produced in our previous simulations without failed supernovae. At high redshifts, contrary to the predictions of classical chemical evolution models with instantaneous mixing approximation, we find almost fla…
We report observation of isotropic interplanetary dust (IPD) by analyzing the infrared (IR) maps of Diffuse Infrared Background Experiment (DIRBE) onboard the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) spacecraft. To search for the isotropic IPD, we perform new analysis in terms of solar elongation angle ($ε$), because we expect zodiacal light (ZL) intensity from the isotropic IPD to decrease as a function of $ε$. We use the DIRBE weekly-averaged maps covering $64^\circ \lesssim ε\lesssim 124^\circ$ and inspect the $ε$-dependence of residual intensity after subtracting conventional ZL components. We fi…
We present Spitzer/IRAC observations of dust formation from six extragalactic carbon-rich Wolf-Rayet (WC) binary candidates in low-metallicity (Z $\lesssim0.65$ Z$_\odot$) environments using multi-epoch mid-infrared (IR) imaging data from the SPitzer InfraRed Intensive Transients Survey (SPIRITS). Optical follow-up spectroscopy of SPIRITS~16ln, 19q, 16df, 18hb, and 14apu reveals emission features from C IV $\lambda5801\text{-}12$~and/or the C III-IV $\lambda4650$ He II $\lambda4686$~blend that are consistent with early-type WC stars. We identify SPIRITS~16ln as the variable mid-IR counterpart …
Integrated light (IL) spectroscopy enables studies of stellar populations beyond the Milky Way and its nearest satellites. In this paper, I will review how IL spectroscopy reveals essential information about globular clusters and the assembly histories of their host galaxies, concentrating particularly on the metallicities and detailed chemical abundances of the GCs in M31. I will also briefly mention the effects of multiple populations on IL spectra, and how observations of distant globular clusters help constrain the source(s) of light-element abundance variations. I will end with future per…
The depletion of elements onto dust grains is characterized using a generalized depletion strength $F_*$ for any sightline, and trend-line parameters $A_X, B_X$ and $z_X$. The parameters $A_X, B_X$ and $z_X$ define the relative depletion pattern, for which values are published in previous works. The present study uses these parameters to calculate post-depleted gas-phase abundances of 15 different elements while varying $F_*$ from 0 to 1. An analysis of emergent strong spectral line intensities, obtained by inputting the calculated abundances into a cloudy model, shows that the depletion stren…
Elements in the interstellar medium (ISM) exist in the form of gas or dust. The interstellar extinction and elemental abundances provide crucial constraints on the composition, size and quantity of interstellar dust. Most of the extinction modeling efforts have assumed the total abundances (both in gas and in dust) of the dust-forming elements---known as the "interstellar abundances", the "interstellar reference abundances", or the "cosmic abundances"---to be solar and the gas-phase abundances to be independent of the interstellar environments. However, it remains unclear if the solar abundanc…
The evolution of the metal content of the universe can be tracked through rest-frame UV spectroscopy of damped Ly-$α$ systems (DLAs). Gas-phase abundances in DLAs must be corrected for dust depletion effects, which can be accomplished by calibrating the relation between abundance ratios such as [Zn/Fe] and depletions (the fraction of metals in gas, as opposed to dust). Using samples of gas-phase abundances and depletions in the Milky Way (MW), LMC, and SMC, we demonstrate that the relation between [Zn/Fe] and other abundance ratios does not change significantly between these local galaxies and…
(ABRIDGED) The origin of the globular cluster (GC) NGC3201 is under debate. Its retrograde orbit points to an extragalactic origin, but no further chemical evidence supports this idea. Light-element chemical abundances are useful to tag GCs and can be used to shed light on this discussion. We aim to derive CN and CH band strengths for red giant stars in NGC3201 and compare these with photometric indices and high-resolution spectroscopy and discuss in the context of GC chemical tagging. We found three groups in the CN-CH distribution. A main sequence (S1), a secondary less-populated sequence (S…
While it is well recognized that both the Galactic interstellar extinction curves and the gas-phase abundances of dust-forming elements exhibit considerable variations from one sight line to another, as yet most of the dust extinction modeling efforts have been directed to the Galactic average extinction curve, which is obtained by averaging over many clouds of different gas and dust properties. Therefore, any details concerning the relationship between the dust properties and the interstellar environments are lost. Here we utilize the wealth of extinction and elemental abundance data obtained…
An intriguing silhouette of a small dust patch can be seen against the disk of the S0 galaxy NGC 3269 in the Antlia cluster in optical images. The images do not provide any clue as to whether the patch is a local Jupiter mass-scale cloudlet or a large extragalactic dust complex. We aim to resolve the nature of this object: is it a small Galactic cloudlet or an extragalactic dust complex? ALMA and APEX spectroscopy and Gemini GMOS long-slit spectroscopy were used to measure the velocity of the patch and the NGC 3269 disk radial velocity curve. A weak 16$\pm$2.5 km/s wide $^{12}$CO (2-1) T$_{MB}…
Increasingly powerful and multiplexed spectroscopic facilities promise detailed chemical abundance patterns for millions of resolved stars in galaxies beyond the Milky Way (MW). Here, we employ the Cramér-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) to forecast the precision to which stellar abundances for metal-poor, low-mass stars outside the MW can be measured for 41 current (e.g., Keck, MMT, VLT, DESI) and planned (e.g., MSE, JWST, ELTs) spectrograph configurations. We show that moderate resolution ($R\lesssim5000$) spectroscopy at blue-optical wavelengths ($λ\lesssim4500$ Å) (i) enables the recovery of 2-4 tim…
We investigate the evolution of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) abundance in a galaxy, which is a crucial step to understand the evolution of bright emission features in the mid-infrared range. We calculate the evolution of dust grain size distribution in a manner consistent with the physical conditions of the interstellar medium by post-processing our previous hydrodynamical simulation of an isolated disc galaxy. We also differentiate between aromatic and non-aromatic grains for carbonaceous dust species and explicitly considered the aromatization process. As a consequence, our model ex…
OH absorption is currently the only viable way to detect OH molecules in non-masing galaxies at cosmological distances. There have been only 6 such detections at z>0.05 to date and so it is hard to put a statistically robust constraint on OH column densities in distant galaxies. We carried out a pilot OH absorption survey towards 8 associated and 1 intervening HI 21-cm absorbers using the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST). We were able to constrain the OH abundance relative to HI ([OH]/[HI]) to be lower than 10^-6 ~ 10^-8 for redshifts z within [0.1919, 0.2241]. Alth…
The leading method for the determination of relevant stellar population parameters of unresolved extragalactic Globular Clusters is through the study of their integrated spectroscopy, where Balmer line-strength indices are considered to be age sensitive. Previously, a splitting in the highly optimised spectral line-strength index H$β_o$ was observed in a sample of Galactic globular clusters at all metallicities resulting in an apparent "upper branch" and "lower branch" of globular clusters in the H$β_o$ - [MgFe] diagram. This was suggested to be caused by the presence of hot Blue straggler sta…
The metallicity and gas density dependence of interstellar depletions, the dust-to-gas (D/G), and dust-to-metal (D/M) ratios have important implications for how accurately we can trace the chemical enrichment of the universe; either by using FIR dust emission as a tracer of the ISM; or by using spectroscopy of damped Lyman-alpha systems (DLAs) to measure chemical abundances over a wide range of redshifts. We collect and compare large samples of depletion measurements in the Milky Way (MW), LMC (Z=0.5 Zsun), and SMC (Z=0.2 Zsun). The relation between the depletions of different elements do not …
Supernova remnant (SNR) shock waves are the main place where interstellar dust grains are destroyed. However, the dust destruction efficiency in non-radiative shocks is still not well known. One way to estimate the fraction of dust destroyed is to compare the difference between postshock gas abundances and preshock medium total abundances when the preshock elemental depletion factors are known. We compare the postshock gas abundances of 16 SNRs in Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) with the LMC interstellar medium abundances that we derived based on 69 slow-rotating early B-type stars. We find that,…
Context. The presence of dust in the neutral interstellar medium (ISM) dramatically changes the metal abundances that we measure. Understanding the metal content in the neutral ISM, and a direct comparison between different environments, has been hampered to date because of the degeneracy to the observed ISM abundances caused by the effects of metallicity, the presence of dust, and nucleosynthesis. Aims. We study the metal and dust content in the neutral ISM consistently in different environments, and assess the universality of recently discovered sequences of relative abundances. We also inte…
Present-day cosmic abundances. A comprehensive study of nearby early B-type stars and implications for stellar and Galactic evolution and interstellar dust models
