A new determination of the primordial helium abundance using the analyses of H <scp>ii</scp> region spectra from SDSS
O. A. Kurichin, P. A. Kislitsyn, V. V. Klimenko, S. A. Balashev, A. V. Ivanchik
Abstract
ABSTRACT The precision measurement of the primordial helium abundance Yp is a powerful probe of the early Universe. The most common way to determine Yp is the analyses of observations of metal-poor H ii regions found in blue compact dwarf galaxies. We present the spectroscopic sample of 100 H ii regions collected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The final analysed sample consists of our sample and HeBCD data base from Izotov et al. (2007). We use a self-consistent procedure to determine physical conditions, current helium abundances, and metallicities of the H ii regions. From a regression to zero metallicity, we have obtained Yp = 0.2462 ± 0.0022, which is one of the most stringent constraints obtained with such methods up to date and is in a good agreement with the Planck result $Y_{\rm p}^{\it {\mathrm{ Planck}}} = 0.2471 \pm 0.0003$. Using the determined value of Yp and the primordial deuterium abundance taken from Particle Data Group (Zyla et al. 2020) we put a constraint on the effective number of neutrino species Neff = 2.95 ± 0.16, which is consistent with the Planck one Neff = 2.99 ± 0.17. Further increase of statistics potentially allows us to achieve Planck accuracy, which in turn will become a powerful tool for studying the self-consistency of the standard cosmological model and/or physics beyond.