Interstellar Dust Models Consistent with Extinction, Emission, and Abundance Constraints

By V. Zubko, E. Dwek, R. Arendt. 2003

543 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present new interstellar dust models that have been derived by simultaneously fitting the far-ultraviolet to near-infrared extinction, the diffuse infrared (IR) emission and, unlike previous models, the elemental abundance constraints on the dust for different interstellar medium abundances, including solar, F and G star, and B star abundances. The fitting problem is a typical ill-posed inversion problem, in which the grain size distribution is the unknown, which we solve by using the method of regularization. The dust model contains various components: polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), bare silicate, graphite, and amorphous carbon particles, as well as composite particles containing silicate, organic refractory material, water ice, and voids. The optical properties of these components were calculated using physical optical constants. As a special case, we reproduce the Li & Draine results; however, their model requires an excessive amount of silicon, magnesium, and iron to be locked up in dust: about 50 ppm (atoms per million of H atoms), significantly more than the upper limit imposed by solar abundances of these elements, about 34, 35, and 28 ppm, respectively. A major conclusion of this paper is that there is no unique interstellar dust model that simultaneously fits the observed extinction, diffuse IR emission, and abundance constraints. We find several classes of acceptable interstellar dust models that comply with these constraints. The first class is identical in composition to the Li & Draine model, consisting of PAHs, bare graphite and silicate grains, but with a different size distribution that is optimized to comply with the abundance constraints. The second class of models contains in addition to PAHs bare graphite and silicate grains also composite particles. Other classes contain amorphous carbon instead of graphite particles, or no carbon at all, except for that in PAHs. All classes are consistent with solar and F and G star abundances but have greater difficulty fitting the B star carbon abundance, which is better fitted with the latter (no carbon) models. Additional observational constraints, such as the interstellar polarization, or X-ray scattering may be able to discriminate between the various interstellar dust models.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/38b9a7753884bfb13456f537766713a1309ce04c

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Citations in the corpus

Present-day cosmic abundances - A comprehensive study of nearby early B-type stars and implications for stellar and Galactic evolution and interstellar dust models (2012, methodology): “Models in analogy to the COMP-NC-type or COMPAC-type models of Zubko et al. (2004) look highly promising for future studies in view of abundance demands and the ability to match other observational constraints like extinction and emission properties of the dust.”
Analysis of the emission of very small dust particles from Spitzer spectro-imagery data using blind signal separation methods (2007, background): “Moreover, as mentioned by Zubko et al. (2004), the optical properties of BGs and VSGs are not well constrained, implying that their size distribution cannotbe derived precisely.”
Non-standard grain properties, dark gas reservoir, and extended submillimeter excess, probed by Herschel in the Large Magellanic Cloud (2011, methodology): “(14) For comparison, the Galactic value is (Zubko et al., 2004): G dust ' 158.”
The Behavior of the Aromatic Features in M101 H II Regions: Evidence for Dust Processing (2008, background): “The leading candidate material for the aromatics is PAH molecules and they are often included in the modified “astronomical PAHs” form in dust grain models (Li & Draine 2001; Zubko et al. 2004).”
A BUDGET AND ACCOUNTING OF METALS AT z ∼ 0: RESULTS FROM THE COS-HALOS SURVEY (2013, methodology): “Using the Weingartner & Draine (2001), Zubko et al. (2004), and Draine & Fraisse (2009) dust models to constrain the oxygen fraction of dust (see also Draine 2011), we find Moxy,dust Mdust = µoxyN oxy dust ∑ X µXNXdust , (A2) where µ is the average atomic mass, X is one of the elements C, N, O, Mg,…”
An Overview of the Dwarf Galaxy Survey (2013, methodology): “…the often-used graphite dust analog, which, along with silicate and PAH components, well-describes the dust composition of the Galaxy (e.g., Zubko et al. 2004; Draine & Li 2007) can lead to inexplicably large dust masses in low metallicity galaxies such as the LMC, as shown by Galliano et…”
LINE DERIVED INFRARED EXTINCTION TOWARD THE GALACTIC CENTER (2011, methodology): “However, it is still uncertain if composite particles are also required (Mathis 1996; Li & Greenberg 1997; Weingartner & Draine 2001; Zubko et al. 2004), including, for example ices and voids in addition to the basic dust grains.”
Fitting the integrated spectral energy distributions of galaxies (2010, methodology): “Yet there are still open questions on shape (how ordered or “fluffy” are the grains, e.g. Zubko et al. 2004), on whether there are other kinds of dust, and on what formation and destruction processes lead to this power-law distribution of sizes (e.g. Jones et al. 1996).”
The dust scaling relations of the Herschel Reference Survey (2012, methodology): “…data across the whole ultraviolet to far-infrared/submm regime using up-to-date dust models and energy balance/radiative transfer techniques (e.g., Zubko et al. 2004; Draine & Li 2007; Bianchi 2008; Galliano et al. 2008; da Cunha et al. 2008; Baes et al. 2010; Compiègne et al. 2011) or just…”
The global dust SED: tracing the nature and evolution of dust with DustEM (2010, methodology): “…models aim to consistently reproduce the observed extinction and emission (Désert et al. 1990, hereafter DBP90) (Siebenmorgen & Kruegel 1992; Dwek et al. 1997; Li & Draine 2001a; Zubko et al. 2004; Draine & Li 2007, hereafter DL07) as well as the associated polarization (Draine & Fraisse 2009).”