Neon Abundances of B-stars in the Solar Neighborhood

We constructed a comprehensive model atom for NeI -- NeII using the most up-to-date atomic data available and evaluated the non-local thermodynamic equilibrium (NLTE) line formation for NeI and NeII in classical 1D models representing the atmospheres of B-type stars. We find that the large NLTE strengthening of the NeI lines corresponding to the 2p$^5$3p $-$ 2p$^5$3s transitions array occurs due to extremely small photoionization cross-sections of 2p$^5$3s levels that leads to strong overpopulation of these levels relative to their LTE populations. The deviations from LTE for the most NeII lines are small and do not exceed 0.11~dex in the absolute value. We analysed 20 lines of NeI and 13 lines of NeII for twenty-four B-type stars in the temperature range of 10\,400 $\le$ \Teff\ $\le$ 33\,400~K. For five stars, the NLTE leads to consistent abundances of NeI and NeII, while the difference in LTE abundance can reach up to 0.50~dex. The using of the experimental oscillator strengths recently measured by Piracha et al. (2015) leads to smaller line-by-line scatter for the most investigated stars. The averaged neon abundance in twenty-four B-type stars in solar neighborhood is 8.02$\pm$0.05. This value may provide indirect constraints on solar photospheric neon abundance.
Comment: 20 pages, 9 figures, accepted to Astrophysical Journal