2022ApJ...941..167M

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 Iλ10830 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 ${Y}_{{\rm{P}}}={0.2370}_{-0.0034}^{+0.0033}$ 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 ${\xi }_{e}={0.05}_{-0.02}^{+0.03}$, ${N}_{\mathrm{eff}}={3.11}_{-0.31}^{+0.34}$, and $\eta \times {10}^{10}={6.08}_{-0.06}^{+0.06}$ 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.