Revisiting the hardening of the stellar ionizing radiation in galaxy disks

Abstract

In this work we explore accurate new ways to derive the ionization parameter ($U$) and the equivalent effective temperature ($T_{\ast }$) in HII regions using emission-line intensities from the ionized gas. The so-called softness parameter ($\eta$), based on [OII], [OIII], [SII], and [SIII] has been proposed to estimate the hardening of the ionizing incident field of radiation, but the simplest relation of this parameter with $T_{\ast }$ also depends on $U$ and metallicity ($Z$). Here we provide a Bayesian-like code (HCm-Teff) that compares the observed emission lines of $\eta$ with the predictions of a large grid of photoionization models giving precise estimations of both $U$ and $T_{\ast }$ when $Z$ is known. We also study the radial variation of these parameters in well-studied disc galaxies observed by the CHAOS collaboration. Our results indicate that the observed radial decreasing of $\eta$ can be attributed to a radial hardening of $T_{\ast }$, across galactic discs as in NGC~628 and NGC~5457. On the other hand NGC~5194, which presents a positive slope of the fitting of the softness parameter, has a flat slope in $T_{\ast }$. On the contrary the three galaxies do not seem to present large radial variations of the ionization parameter. When we inspect a larger sample of galaxies we observe steeper radial variations of $T_{\ast }$ in less bright and later-type galaxies, mimicking a similar trend observed for $Z$ but the studied sample should be enlarged to obtain more statistically significant conclusions.

15 pages, 13 figures, 2 tables, accepted for publication in MNRAS

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• Hardness of ionizing radiation fields in MaNGA star-forming galaxies
• The softness diagram for MaNGA star-forming regions: diffuse ionized gas contamination or local HOLMES predominance?
• Exploring the hardness of the ionizing radiation with the infrared softness diagram. II. Bimodal distributions in both the ionizing continuum slope and the excitation in active galactic nuclei
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