Optical and infrared emission lines from H II regions are an important diagnostic used to study galaxies, but interpretation of these lines requires significant modeling of both the internal... Show moreOptical and infrared emission lines from H II regions are an important diagnostic used to study galaxies, but interpretation of these lines requires significant modeling of both the internal structure and dynamical evolution of the emitting regions. Most of the models in common use today assume that H II region dynamics are dominated by the expansion of stellar wind bubbles, and have neglected the contribution of radiation pressure to the dynamics, and in some cases also to the internal structure. However, recent observations of nearby galaxies suggest that neither assumption is justified, motivating us to revisit the question of how H II region line emission depends on the physics of winds and radiation pressure. In a companion paper we construct models of single H II regions including and excluding radiation pressure and winds, and in this paper we describe a population synthesis code that uses these models to simulate galactic collections of H II regions with varying physical parameters. We show that the choice of physical parameters has significant effects on galactic emission line ratios, and that in some cases the line ratios can exceed previously claimed theoretical limits. Our results suggest that the recently reported offset in line ratio values between high-redshift star-forming galaxies and those in the local universe may be partially explained by the presence of large numbers of radiation-pressure-dominated H II regions within them. Show less
The emission line ratios [O III] {$λ$}5007/H{$β$} and [N II] {$λ$}6584/H{$α$} have been adopted as an empirical way to distinguish between the fundamentally different mechanisms of ionization in... Show moreThe emission line ratios [O III] {$λ$}5007/H{$β$} and [N II] {$λ$}6584/H{$α$} have been adopted as an empirical way to distinguish between the fundamentally different mechanisms of ionization in emission-line galaxies. However, detailed interpretation of these diagnostics requires calculations of the internal structure of the emitting H II regions, and these calculations depend on the assumptions one makes about the relative importance of radiation pressure and stellar winds. In this paper, we construct a grid of quasi-static H II region models to explore how choices about these parameters alter H II regions' emission line ratios. We find that when radiation pressure is included in our models, H II regions reach a saturation point beyond which further increase in the luminosity of the driving stars does not produce any further increase in effective ionization parameter, and thus does not yield any further alteration in an H II region's line ratio. We also show that if stellar winds are assumed to be strong, the maximum possible ionization parameter is quite low. As a result of this effect, it is inconsistent to simultaneously assume that H II regions are wind-blown bubbles and that they have high ionization parameters; some popular H II region models suffer from this inconsistency. Our work in this paper provides a foundation for a companion paper in which we embed the model grids we compute here within a population synthesis code that enables us to compute the integrated line emission from galactic populations of H II regions. Show less
