He II Raman Scattered Line by Neutral Hydrogen in the Bipolar Platenary Nebula M2-9

Abstract

In the spectrum of the young bipolar planetary nebula M2-9 obtained from the 1.5 m telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, we detected the He~II feature at 6545 Å that are proposed to be formed via Raman scattering by atomic hydrogen. However, in the same spectrum, the He~II emission lines at 6527 Å and 6560 Å are absent, which implies that the He~II emission region is hidden from our line of sight and that the H~I scattering region is pretty much extended not to be obscured entirely. We performed photoionization computations to estimate the physical size of the He~II emission line region to be 1016 cm, from which the location and dimension of the obscuring circumstellar region are inferred and the temperature of the central star must exceed 105 K. The angular size of the circumstellar region responsible for the obscuration of the He~II emission region is ~ 1'' with the assumption of the distance 01 kpc to M2-9, which is consistent with the recent image of M2-9 obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope.

Keywords

• PLANETARY NEBULA
• SPECTROSCOPY
• RADIATIVE TRANSFER
• SCATTERING