Cool gaseous nebulae

The electron temperatures of diffuse gaseous nebulae have long been thought to be close to 10/sup 4/K. Much lower temperatures were derived from some of the early radio continuum and recombination line work, but these were generally considered to be wrong for a variety of reasons. While there is little doubt that the bright nebulae do indeed have temperatures of approximately 8000-9000K, there are strong indications that some nebulae of lower densities have much lower temperatures, <or approximately=4000-5000K. Radio combination line observations of several low-density nebulae were made in order to determine electron temperatures in the absence of such effects as collisional de-excitation, stimulated emission, and pressure broadening. Several of these nebulae have been found to have temperatures below 5000K and for two of them which are discussed (RCW94 and G339.1-0.2) absolute upper limits of approximately 4700 K are imposed by the line widths alone. (11 refs).