EMPRESS. VIII. A New Determination of Primordial He Abundance with Extremely Metal-poor Galaxies: A Suggestion of the Lepton Asymmetry and Implications for the Hubble Tension

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  • Akinori Matsumoto
  • Masami Ouchi
  • Kimihiko Nakajima
  • Masahiro Kawasaki
  • Kai Murai
  • Kentaro Motohara
  • Yuichi Harikane
  • Yoshiaki Ono
  • Kosuke Kushibiki
  • Shuhei Koyama
  • Shohei Aoyama
  • Masahiro Konishi
  • Hidenori Takahashi
  • Yuki Isobe
  • Hiroya Umeda
  • Yuma Sugahara
  • Masato Onodera
  • Kentaro Nagamine
  • Haruka Kusakabe
  • Yutaka Hirai
  • And 25 others
  • Takashi J. Moriya
  • Takatoshi Shibuya
  • Yutaka Komiyama
  • Keita Fukushima
  • Seiji Fujimoto
  • Takashi Hattori
  • Kohei Hayashi
  • Akio K. Inoue
  • Shotaro Kikuchihara
  • Takashi Kojima
  • Yusei Koyama
  • Chien Hsiu Lee
  • Ken Mawatari
  • Takashi Miyata
  • Tohru Nagao
  • Shinobu Ozaki
  • Michael Rauch
  • Tomoki Saito
  • Akihiro Suzuki
  • Tsutomu T. Takeuchi
  • Masayuki Umemura
  • Yi Xu
  • Kiyoto Yabe
  • Yechi Zhang
  • Yuzuru Yoshii

The primordial He abundance Y P is a powerful probe of cosmology. Currently, Y P is best determined by observations of metal-poor galaxies, while there are only a few known local extremely metal-poor (<0.1Z ) galaxies (EMPGs) having reliable He/H measurements with He i λ10830 near-infrared (NIR) emission. Here we present deep Subaru NIR spectroscopy for 10 EMPGs. Combining the existing optical data, He/H values of 5 out of the 10 EMPGs are reliably derived by the Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm. Adding the existing 3 EMPGs and 51 moderately metal-poor (0.1-0.4Z ) galaxies with reliable He/H estimates, we obtain Y P = 0.2370 − 0.0034 + 0.0033 by linear regression in the (He/H) − (O/H) plane, where we increase the number of EMPGs from three to eight anchoring He/H of the most metal-poor gas in galaxies. Although our Y P measurement and previous measurements are consistent, our result is slightly (∼1σ) smaller due to our EMPGs. Including the existing primordial deuterium D P measurement, we constrain the effective number of neutrino species N eff and the baryon-to-photon ratio η showing ≳1-2σ tensions with the Standard Model and Planck Collaboration et al. (2020). Motivated by the tensions, we allow the degeneracy parameter of the electron neutrino ξ e , as well as N eff and η, to vary. We obtain ξ e = 0.05 − 0.02 + 0.03 , N eff = 3.11 − 0.31 + 0.34 , and η × 10 10 = 6.08 − 0.06 + 0.06 from the Y P and D P measurements with a prior of η taken from Planck Collaboration et al. Our constraints suggest a lepton asymmetry and allow for a high value of N eff within the 1σ level, which could mitigate the Hubble tension.

Original languageEnglish
Article number167
JournalAstrophysical Journal
Volume941
Issue number2
Number of pages14
ISSN0004-637X
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Dec 2022

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© 2022. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.

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