2005A&A...443..293P

The near-IR HeI10830Å transition is a highly sensitive diagnostic for non-LTE effects in astrophysical plasmas. So far, non-LTE line-formation computations have failed to quantitatively reproduce observations of this line in the entire range of early-A to late-O main sequence stars. It is shown that the non-LTE modelling was insufficient, for the most part, either because of inaccurate photoionization cross-sections for the 2s³S state or because of neglecting line blocking. New calculations based on state-of-the-art atomic data give excellent agreement with observation for the HeI10830Å feature, while profiles of the HeI lines in the visual are retained.