Journal
ASTRONOMY & ASTROPHYSICS
Volume 576, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
EDP SCIENCES S A
DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201425389
Keywords
stars: atmospheres; galaxies: abundances; galaxies: starburst
Categories
Funding
- UNAM PAPIIT [IN109614]
- CONACyT [CB-2010/153985]
- Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomy in Bonn (MPIfR)
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- National Science Foundation
- US Department of Energy
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- Japanese Monbukagakusho
- Max Planck Society
- Higher Education Funding Council for England
- US Department of Energy Office of Science
- American Museum of Natural History
- Astrophysical Institute Potsdam
- University of Basel
- University of Cambridge
- Case Western Reserve University
- University of Chicago
- Drexel University
- Fermilab
- Institute for Advanced Study
- Japan Participation Group
- Johns Hopkins University
- Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics
- Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology
- Korean Scientist Group
- Chinese Academy of Sciences (LAMOST)
- Los Alamos National Laboratory
- Max-Planck-Institute for Astronomy (MPIA)
- Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics (MPA)
- New Mexico State University
- Ohio State University
- University of Pittsburgh
- University of Portsmouth
- Princeton University
- United States Naval Observatory
- University of Washington
- University of Arizona
- Brazilian Participation Group
- Brookhaven National Laboratory
- Carnegie Mellon University
- University of Florida
- French Participation Group
- German Participation Group
- Harvard University
- Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias
- Michigan State/Notre Dame/JINA Participation Group
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
- Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics
- Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics
- New York University
- Pennsylvania State University
- Spanish Participation Group
- University of Tokyo
- University of Utah
- Vanderbilt University
- University of Virginia
- Yale University
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The possibility that star-forming galaxies may leak ionizing photons is at the heart of many present-day studies that investigate the reionization of the Universe. We test this hypothesis on local blue compact dwarf galaxies of very high excitation. We assembled a sample of such galaxies by examining the spectra from data releases 7 and 10 of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We argue that reliable conclusions cannot be based on strong lines alone, and adopt a strategy that includes important weak lines such as [O I] and the high-excitation He II and [Ar IV] lines. Our analysis is based on purely observational diagrams and on a comparison of photoionization models with well-chosen emission-line ratio diagrams. We show that spectral energy distributions from current stellar population synthesis models cannot account for all the observational constraints, which led us to mimick several scenarios that could explain the data. These include the additional presence of hard X-rays or of shocks. We find that only ionization-bounded models ( or models with an escape fraction of ionizing photons lower than 10%) are able to simultaneously explain all the observational constraints.
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