The global dust SED: tracing the nature and evolution of dust with DustEM

By Mathieu Compiègne, L. Verstraete, A. Jones, J. Bernard, F. Boulanger, N. Flagey, Jacques Le Bourlot, D. Paradis, N. Ysard. 2010

320 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Planck and Herschel missions are currently measuring the far-infrared to millimeter emission of dust, which combined with existing IR data, will for the first time provide the full spectral energy distribution (SED) of the galactic interstellar medium dust emission, from the mid-IR to the mm range, with an unprecedented sensitivity and down to spatial scales ∼30 �� . Such a global SED will allow a systematic study of the dust evolution processes (e.g. grain growth or fragmentation) that directly affect the SED because they redistribute the dust mass among the observed grain sizes. The dust SED is also affected by variations of the radiation field intensity. Here we present a versatile numerical tool, DustEM, that predicts the emission and extinction of dust grains given their size distribution and their optical and thermal properties. In order to model dust evolution, DustEM has been designed to deal with a variety of grain types, structures and size distributions and to be able to easily include new dust physics. We use DustEM to model the dust SED and extinction in the diffuse interstellar medium at high-galactic latitude (DHGL), a natural reference SED that will allow us to study dust evolution. We present a coherent set of observations for the DHGL SED, which has been obtained by correlating the IR and HI-21 cm data. The dust components in our DHGL model are (i) polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons; (ii) amorphous carbon and (iii) amorphous silicates. We use amorphous carbon dust, rather than graphite, because it better explains the observed high abundances of gas-phase carbon in shocked regions of the interstellar medium. Using the DustEM model, we illustrate how, in the optically thin limit, the IRAS/Planck HFI (and likewise Spitzer/Herschel for smaller spatial scales) photometric band ratios of the dust SED can disentangle the influence of the exciting radiation field intensity and constrain the abundance of small grains (a < 10 nm) relative to the larger grains. We also discuss the contributions of the different grain populations to the IRAS, Planck (and similarly to Herschel) channels. Such information is required to enable a study of the evolution of dust as well as to systematically extract the dust thermal emission from CMB data and to analyze the emission in the Planck polarized channels. The DustEM code described in this paper is publically available. Dust plays a key role in the physics (e.g. heating of the gas, coupling to the magnetic field) and chemistry (formation of H2, shielding of molecules from dissociative radiation) of the interstellar medium (ISM). Heated by stellar photons, dust grains radiate away the absorbed energy by emission in the near-IR to mm range. Dust emission can thus be used as a tracer of the radiation field intensity and, hence, of star formation activity. Assuming a constant dust abundance, the far-IR to mm dust emission is also used to derive the total column density along a line of sight and to provide mass estimates. The impact of dust on the ISM and the use of its emission as a tracer of the local conditions depends on the dust properties and abundances. It is therefore of major importance to understand dust properties and their evolution throughout the ISM. The instruments onboard the Herschel and Planck satel

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/af2e4c30c1e1a3ef8e8b75732a137104c48f53a1

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Instrumentation

Citations in the corpus

Three-Dimensional Dust Radiative Transfer ∗ (2013, methodology): “…have been developed to calculate the temperature distribution of small dust grains, using either matrix operations or time averages (see, e.g., Compiègne et al. 2011, Desert, Boulanger & Shore 1986, Draine & Li 2001, Dwek 1986, Guhathakurta & Draine 1989, Siebenmorgen, Kruegel & Mathis 1992).”
Planck 2013 results. XI. All-sky model of thermal dust emission (2013, methodology): “In the years since the work of Schlegel et al. (1998), many models have been put forward self-consistently describing dust emission and extinction (e.g., Draine & Li 2007; Compiègne et al. 2011) and they could be used to convert emission to extinction.”
Hi-GAL, the Herschel infrared Galactic Plane Survey: Photometric maps and compact source catalogues: First data release for the inner Milky Way: +68° ≥ l ≥ -70° (2016, methodology): “The dust temperature assumed is that of Planck Collaboration (2011b) with the standard dust distribution of Compiégne et al. (2011).”
H$_2$ formation on interstellar dust grains: the viewpoints of theory, experiments, models and observations (2017, methodology): “Dust properties in the diffuse and translucent ISM The dust properties in the diffuse ISM have been the subect of numerous studies; including, for example, the Draine and i 2007 and Compiègne et al. 2011 models.”
Non-standard grain properties, dark gas reservoir, and extended submillimeter excess, probed by Herschel in the Large Magellanic Cloud (2011, unknown): “In the Milky Way, the most complete and accurate models are constrained by observations of high latitude cirrus clouds: their IR emission, ultraviolet (UV)-to-near-IR extinction, and elemental depletions (Zubko et al., 2004; Draine & Li, 2007; Compiègne et al., 2011).”
The evolution of amorphous hydrocarbons in the ISM: dust modelling from a new vantage point (2013, methodology): “Using the DustEM tool (Compiègne et al. 2011) we have calculated the predicted properties for our dust model.”
EFFICIENT THREE-DIMENSIONAL NLTE DUST RADIATIVE TRANSFER WITH SKIRT (2011, methodology): “We have implemented a library approach to limit the computational cost of the NLTE dust emission calculations inherent in DustEM.”
Planck intermediate results. XXII. Frequency dependence of thermal emission from Galactic dust in intensity and polarization (2014, methodology): “The ﬁrst two models use the same optical properties for silicates, but distinct properties for carbon grains; Draine & Li (2007) use the optical properties of graphite, while Compiègne et al. (2011) use results from laboratory measurements of amorphous carbon.”
Probing the dust properties of galaxies up to submillimetre wavelengths. II. Dust-to-gas mass ratio trends with metallicity and the submm excess in dwarf galaxies (2011, result): “We emphasis that this model is consistent with the recent results of Draine et al. (2007) and the DustEM model of Compiègne et al. (2011).”
The dust scaling relations of the Herschel Reference Survey (2012, background): “…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 assuming simple single/double modified black-body emission (e.g., Dunne et al. 2000; Vlahakis et al. 2005).”
A 100 pc ELLIPTICAL AND TWISTED RING OF COLD AND DENSE MOLECULAR CLOUDS REVEALED BY HERSCHEL AROUND THE GALACTIC CENTER (2011, methodology): “Opacity and dust temperature are estimated from a pixelto-pixel fit to the 70-350 µm data (the resolution is matched to the 350 µm images – ∼25′′) using the DustEM model (Compiègne et al. 2011) following the method described in Bernard et al. (2010).”
The global dust modelling framework THEMIS (The Heterogeneous dust Evolution Model for Interstellar Solids) (2017, background): “Some later dust models followed this same basic approach but abandoned "astronomical" graphite in favour of physically morerealistic amorphous carbons (e.g., Zubko et al. 2004; Compiègne et al. 2011; Galliano et al. 2011).”
LINE DERIVED INFRARED EXTINCTION TOWARD THE GALACTIC CENTER (2011, background): “Ideally, the dust model should also be plausible with regards to the formation and destruction of the dust (Compiègne et al. 2011).”
THE EMISSION BY DUST AND STARS OF NEARBY GALAXIES IN THE HERSCHEL KINGFISH SURVEY (2011, background): “Estimates of LTIR are designed to encompass all of the emission from PAH particles, very small grains, and large grains, the proportions of which depend on the starlight density distribution and the relative abundances of the grain populations (Draine & Li 2007; Compiégne et al. 2011).”
The pre-launch Planck Sky Model: a model of sky emission at submillimetre to centimetre wavelengths (2012, methodology): “…that, even though it is thought that interstellar dust is made of carbonaceous and silicate grains, the dust spectral indices and equilibrium temperatures used in this model are not compatible with the current knowledge of thermal emission from big grains (Li & Draine 2001; Compiègne et al. 2011).”