The Oxygen Abundance in the Solar Neighborhood

Abstract

We present a homogeneous analysis of the oxygen abundance in five H II regions and eight planetary nebulae (PNe) located at distances lower than 2 kpc and with available spectra of high quality. We find that both the collisionally excited lines and recombination lines imply that the PNe are overabundant in oxygen by about 0.2 dex. An explanation that reconciles the oxygen abundances derived with collisionally excited lines for H II regions and PNe with the values found for B-stars, the Sun, and the diffuse ISM requires the presence in H II regions of an organic refractory dust component that is not present in PNe. This dust component has already been invoked to explain the depletion of oxygen in molecular clouds and in the diffuse interstellar medium.

5 pages, 1 figure, accepted for publication in ApJ Letters

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• The Te[N II]-Te[O III] temperature relation in H II regions and the reliability of strong-line methods
• The impact of spectra quality on nebular abundances
• Chemical abundances in the protoplanetary disk LV2 (Orion) - II: High dispersion VLT observations and microjet properties
• Metallicity gradients in M31, M33, NGC 300 and the Milky Way using abundances of different elements
• Chlorine and Sulfur in Nearby Planetary Nebulae and H II Regions