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Reply to: Effects of density and temperature variations on the metallicity of Mrk71

Nature Astronomy volume 8, pages 278–279 (2024)Cite this article

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replying to J. E. Méndez-Delgado et al. Nature Astronomy https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-024-02198-8 (2024)

In our paper1, we introduced a new method to directly measure temperature fluctuations and applied it to a nearby dwarf galaxy, Mrk 71, finding a temperature fluctuation parameter t2 = 0.008 ± 0.043. This result is lower by ~2σ than the value required to explain the abundance discrepancy (AD) in this object. In their comment2, Méndez-Delgado et al. claim that using the same data presented in ref. 1 in a different way, it is possible to conclude that the measurements are consistent with a larger t2 ≈ 0.1 inferred indirectly from recombination lines. However, this requires a higher density such that the infrared [O iii] 52 μm and [O iii] 88 μm lines—which form the basis of the direct measurement method—are mutually inconsistent. Moreover, to reach agreement between the direct t2 measurement and the larger t2 value inferred from recombination lines requires systematically varying four parameters by ~1σ from their best-determined values, which collectively amount to an ~2σ difference, consistent with the significance (~2σ) originally reported in ref. 1. Therefore, we conclude that the results of ref. 1 hold, and that the combined optical and infrared [O iii] data disfavour t2 ≈ 0.1 at the ~2σ level in Mrk 71. Future work is nonetheless warranted to better understand the AD associated with both optical and infrared emission line analysis.

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Data availability

All data have been provided in ref. 1.

Code availability

This study uses publicly available software and packages that have been provided in ref. 1.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, USA

    Yuguang Chen, Tucker Jones, Ryan Sanders & Erin Huntzinger

  2. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA

    Ryan Sanders

  3. SOFIA Science Center, NASA Ames Research Center, Mountain View, CA, USA

    Dario Fadda, Jessica Sutter & Robert Minchin

  4. Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Dario Fadda

  5. Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences, Department of Physics, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Jessica Sutter

  6. Pete V. Domenici Science Operations Center, National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Socorro, NM, USA

    Robert Minchin

  7. The Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Peter Senchyna

  8. Steward Observatory, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Daniel Stark & Benjamin Weiner

  9. Department of Physics and Astronomy and George P. and Cynthia Woods Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

    Justin Spilker

  10. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Guido Roberts-Borsani

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  1. Yuguang Chen
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  2. Tucker Jones
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  7. Erin Huntzinger
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  8. Peter Senchyna
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  9. Daniel Stark
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  10. Justin Spilker
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  11. Benjamin Weiner
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  12. Guido Roberts-Borsani
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Contributions

Y.C. led the preparation of the paper. All authors provided feedback on the paper.

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Correspondence to Yuguang Chen.

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Chen, Y., Jones, T., Sanders, R. et al. Reply to: Effects of density and temperature variations on the metallicity of Mrk71. Nat Astron 8, 278–279 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-024-02199-7

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