Internal Variations in Empirical Oxygen Abundances for Giant HII Regions in the Galaxy NGC 2403

This paper presents a spectroscopic investigation of 11 HII regions in the nearby galaxy NGC 2403. The HII regions are observed with a long-slit spectrograph mounted on the 2.16 m telescope at XingLong station of National Astronomical Observatories of China. For each of the HII regions, spectra are extracted at different nebular radii along the slit-coverage. Oxygen abundances are empirically estimated from the strong-line indices R23, N2O2, O3N2, and N2 for each spectrophotometric unit, with both observation- and model-based calibrations adopted into the derivation. Radial profiles of these diversely estimated abundances are drawn for each nebula. In the results, the oxygen abundances separately estimated with the prescriptions on the basis of observations and models, albeit from the same spectral index, systematically deviate from each other; at the same time, the spectral indices R23 and N2O2 are distributed with flat profiles, whereas N2 and O3N2 exhibit apparent gradients with the nebular radius. Because our study naturally samples various ionization levels which inherently decline at larger radii within individual HII regions, the radial distributions indicate not only the robustness of R23 and N2O2 against ionization variations but also the sensitivity of N2 and O3N2 to the ionization parameter. The results in this paper provide observational corroboration of the theoretical prediction about the deviation in the empirical abundance diagnostics. Our future work is planned to investigate metal-poor HII regions with measurable T_e, in an attempt to recalibrate the strong-line indices and consequently disclose the cause of the discrepancies between the empirical oxygen abundances.Comment: 16 pages, 10 figures, 5 tables; accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal; with a minor correction in the tex

Characterizing Ultraviolet and Infrared Observational Properties for Galaxies. II. Features of Attenuation Law

Variations in the attenuation law have a significant impact on observed spectral energy distributions for galaxies. As one important observational property for galaxies at ultraviolet and infrared wavelength bands, the correlation between infrared-to-ultraviolet luminosity ratio and ultraviolet color index (or ultraviolet spectral slope), i.e., the IRX-UV relation (or IRX-beta relation), offered a widely used recipe for correcting dust attenuation in galaxies, but the usability appears to be in doubt now because of considerable dispersion in this relation found by many studies. In this paper, on the basis of spectral synthesis modeling and spatially resolved measurements of four nearby spiral galaxies, we provide an interpretation of the deviation in the IRX-UV relation with variations in the attenuation law. From both theoretical and observational viewpoints, two components in the attenuation curve, the linear background and the 2175 Angstrom bump, are suggested to be the parameters in addition to the stellar population age (addressed in the first paper of this series) in the IRX-UV function; different features in the attenuation curve are diagnosed for the galaxies in our sample. Nevertheless, it is often difficult to ascertain the attenuation law for galaxies in actual observations. Possible reasons for preventing the successful detection of the parameters in the attenuation curve are also discussed in this paper, including the degeneracy of the linear background and the 2175 Angstrom bump in observational channels, the requirement for young and dust-rich systems to study, and the difficulty in accurate estimates of dust attenuations at different wavelength bands.Comment: 25 pages, 23 figures, 5 tables; accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journa

Characterizing AGB stars in Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) bands

Since asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars are bright and extended infrared objects, most Galactic AGB stars saturate the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) detectors and therefore the WISE magnitudes that are restored by applying point-spread-function fitting need to be verified. Statistical properties of circumstellar envelopes around AGB stars are discussed on the basis of a WISE AGB catalog verified in this way. We cross-matched an AGB star sample with the WISE All-Sky Source Catalog and the Two Mircon All Sky Survey catalog. Infrared Space Observatory (ISO) spectra of a subsample of WISE AGB stars were also exploited. The dust radiation transfer code DUSTY was used to help predict the magnitudes in the W1 and W2 bands, the two WISE bands most affected by saturation, for calibration purpose, and to provide physical parameters of the AGB sample stars for analysis. DUSTY is verified against the ISO spectra to be a good tool to reproduce the spectral energy distributions of these AGB stars. Systematic magnitude-dependent offsets have been identified in WISE W1 and W2 magnitudes of the saturated AGB stars, and empirical calibration formulas are obtained for them on the basis of 1877 (W1) and 1558 (W2) AGB stars that are successfully fit with DUSTY. According to the calibration formulae, the corrections for W1 at 5 mag and W2 at 4 mag are $-0.383$ and 0.217 mag, respectively. In total, we calibrated the W1/W2 magnitudes of 2390/2021 AGB stars. The model parameters from the DUSTY and the calibrated WISE W1 and W2 magnitudes are used to discuss the behavior of the WISE color-color diagrams of AGB stars. The model parameters also reveal that O-rich AGB stars with opaque circumstellar envelopes are much rarer than opaque C-rich AGB stars toward the anti-Galactic center direction, which we attribute to the metallicity gradient of our Galaxy.Comment: 9 pages in two column format, 7 figures, accepted for publication in A&

Microstructure and mechanical properties of large size as-cast Ti-43Al-9V-0.2Y (at.%) alloy ingot from brim to centre

A Ti-43Al-9V-0.2Y (at.%) alloy ingot with the size of Ф160×400mm was prepared by vacuum arc remelting (VAR). The microstructure of the as-cast Ti-43Al-9V-0.2Y alloy was composed of B2/α₂/γ lamellar colonies and massive B2 and γ phases which were distributed along the boundaries of these lamellar colonies in the form of equiaxed grains. Based on the grain size variation along the radius direction of the ingot, the ingot could be divided into four ring regions from brim to centre. It has been understood that the grain size variation between these four regions was due to the interplay of the effects of the cooling rate and the yttrium content on solidified microstructures in these regions. Mechanical testing of the samples cut from these four regions showed that there existed a clear correlation between the yield strength and the average grain sizes of the four ring regions, which approximately conformed to a Hall-Petch relationship