The LBT Y p Project. IV. A New Value of the Primordial Helium Abundance

Abstract We present a new determination of the primordial helium abundance based on new, high-quality Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) observations of 54 metal-poor H ii regions. These regions have been observed and analyzed uniformly. We also describe a number of updates to our methodology, including updated helium emissivities. Enabled by the large, high-quality dataset, we examine our sample targets for potential systematic errors, which could bias their results. We perform a standard 95% confidence level (CL) χ 2 cut and find that a significantly larger fraction (47/54 = 87%) of our sample qualifies than for previous datasets. We also screen for quality and reliability, flagging targets that may introduce significant systematic errors, producing a dataset of 41 targets. In a significant breakthrough for the field, that dataset includes 15 high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) targets with low metallicity (O/H ≤ 4 × 10 −5 ). Due to this low-metallicity dataset, for the first time, a weighted average for determining the primordial helium abundance ( y p ) is well justified and produces a robust result. By weighted average of our 15 low-metallicity targets, we determine y p = 0.08146 ± 0.00058, with the corresponding mass fraction Y p = 0.2458 ± 0.0013. This result achieves an unprecedented precision of 0.5%, and it is in good agreement with the Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) result, Y p = 0.2467 ± 0.0002, based on the Planck determination of the baryon density.