Dust Grain Size Distributions and Extinction in the Milky Way, LMC, and SMC

By J. Weingartner, B. Draine. 2000

1,259 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We construct size distributions for carbonaceous and silicate grain populations in different regions of the Milky Way, LMC, and SMC. The size distributions include sufficient very small carbonaceous grains (including polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon molecules) to account for the observed infrared and microwave emission from the diffuse interstellar medium. Our distributions reproduce the observed extinction of starlight, which varies depending upon the interstellar environment through which the light travels. As shown by Cardelli, Clayton & Mathis in 1989, these variations can be roughly parameterized by the ratio of visual extinction to reddening, R_V. We adopt a fairly simple functional form for the size distribution, characterized by several parameters. We tabulate these parameters for various combinations of values for R_V and b_C, the C abundance in very small grains. We also find size distributions for the line of sight to HD 210121, and for sightlines in the LMC and SMC. For several size distributions, we evaluate the albedo and scattering asymmetry parameter, and present model extinction curves extending beyond the Lyman limit.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c0a632172026e13c42192180c0d1c0928de9f6de

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

The Dust Opacity of Star‐forming Galaxies (2001, background): “…Clayton & Gibson 1998; Voshchinnikov & Mathis 1999), as well as grain size distributions that significantly depart from the original power law model (Kim, Martin & Hendry 1994; Weingartner & Draine 2000), have all been suggested as possible alternatives/complements to the graphite/silicate model.”