No Arabic abstract
Dust properties appear to vary according to the environment in which the dust evolves. Previous observational indications of these variations in the FIR and submm spectral range are scarce and limited to specific regions of the sky. To determine whether these results can be generalised to larger scales, we study the evolution in dust emissivities from the FIR to mm wavelengths, in the atomic and molecular ISM, along the Galactic plane towards the outer Galaxy. We correlate the dust FIR to mm emission with the HI and CO emission. The study is carried out using the DIRBE data from 100 to 240 mic, the Archeops data from 550 mic to 2.1 mm, and the WMAP data at 3.2 mm (W band), in regions with Galactic latitude |b| < 30 deg, over the Galactic longitude range (75 deg < l < 198 deg) observed with Archeops. In all regions studied, the emissivity spectra in both the atomic and molecular phases are steeper in the FIR (beta = 2.4) than in the submm and mm (beta = 1.5). We find significant variations in the spectral shape of the dust emissivity as a function of the dust temperature in the molecular phase. Regions of similar dust temperature in the molecular and atomic gas exhibit similar emissivity spectra. Regions where the dust is significantly colder in the molecular phase show a significant increase in emissivity for the range 100 - 550 mic. This result supports the hypothesis of grain coagulation in these regions, confirming results obtained over small fractions of the sky in previous studies and allowing us to expand these results to the cold molecular environments in general of the outer MW. We note that it is the first time that these effects have been demonstrated by direct measurement of the emissivity, while previous studies were based only on thermal arguments.
The Planck-HFI all-sky survey from 353 to 857GHz combined with the 100 microns IRAS show that the dust properties vary in the diffuse ISM at high Galactic latitude (1e19<NH<2.5e20 H/cm2). Our aim is to explain these variations with changes in the ISM properties and grain evolution. Our starting point is the latest core-mantle dust model. It consists of small aromatic-rich carbon grains, larger amorphous carbon grains with aliphatic-rich cores and aromatic-rich mantles, and amorphous silicates with Fe/FeS nano-inclusions covered by aromatic-rich carbon mantles. We explore whether variations in the radiation field or in the gas density distribution in the diffuse ISM could explain the observations. The dust properties are also varied in terms of mantle thickness, Fe/FeS inclusions, carbon abundance, and size distribution. Variations in the radiation field intensity and gas density distribution cannot explain the observed variations but radiation fields harder than the standard ISRF may participate in creating part of them. We further show that variations in the grain mantle thickness coupled with changes in the grain size distribution can reproduce most of the observations. We put a limit on the mantle thickness of the silicates (~10-15nm), and find that aromatic-rich mantles are needed for the carbon grains (at least 5-7.5nm thick). We also find that changes in the carbon abundance in the grains could explain part of the observed variations. Finally, we show that varying the composition of Fe/FeS inclusions in the silicates cannot account for the variations. With small variations in the dust properties, we are able to explain most of the variations in the dust emission observed by Planck-HFI in the diffuse ISM. We also find that the small realistic changes in the dust properties that we consider almost perfectly match the anti-correlation and scatter in the observed beta-T relation.
We introduce a dust model for cosmological simulations implemented in the moving-mesh code AREPO and present a suite of cosmological hydrodynamical zoom-in simulations to study dust formation within galactic haloes. Our model accounts for the stellar production of dust, accretion of gas-phase metals onto existing grains, destruction of dust through local supernova activity, and dust driven by winds from star-forming regions. We find that accurate stellar and active galactic nuclei feedback is needed to reproduce the observed dust-metallicity relation and that dust growth largely dominates dust destruction. Our simulations predict a dust content of the interstellar medium which is consistent with observed scaling relations at $z = 0$, including scalings between dust-to-gas ratio and metallicity, dust mass and gas mass, dust-to-gas ratio and stellar mass, and dust-to-stellar mass ratio and gas fraction. We find that roughly two-thirds of dust at $z = 0$ originated from Type II supernovae, with the contribution from asymptotic giant branch stars below 20 per cent for $z gtrsim 5$. While our suite of Milky Way-sized galaxies forms dust in good agreement with a number of key observables, it predicts a high dust-to-metal ratio in the circumgalactic medium, which motivates a more realistic treatment of thermal sputtering of grains and dust cooling channels.
Stellar ages are a crucial component to studying the evolution of the Milky Way. Using Gaia DR2 distance estimates, it is now possible to estimate stellar ages for a larger volume of evolved stars through isochrone matching. This work presents [M/H]-age and [$alpha$/M]-age relations derived for different spatial locations in the Milky Way disc. These relations are derived by hierarchically modelling the star formation history of stars within a given chemical abundance bin. For the first time, we directly observe that significant variation is apparent in the [M/H]-age relation as a function of both Galactocentric radius and distance from the disc mid-plane. The [M/H]-age relations support claims that radial migration has a significant effect in the plane of the disc. Using the [M/H] bin with the youngest mean age at each radial zone in the plane of the disc, the present-day metallicity gradient is measured to be $-0.059 pm 0.010$ dex kpc$^{-1}$, in agreement with Cepheids and young field stars. We find a vertically flared distribution of young stars in the outer disc, confirming predictions of models and previous observations. The mean age of the [M/H]-[$alpha$/M] distribution of the solar neighborhood suggests that the high-[M/H] stars are not an evolutionary extension of the low-$alpha$ sequence. Our observational results are important constraints to Galactic simulations and models of chemical evolution.
We use SDSS photometry of 73 million stars to simultaneously obtain best-fit main-sequence stellar energy distribution (SED) and amount of dust extinction along the line of sight towards each star. Using a subsample of 23 million stars with 2MASS photometry, whose addition enables more robust results, we show that SDSS photometry alone is sufficient to break degeneracies between intrinsic stellar color and dust amount when the shape of extinction curve is fixed. When using both SDSS and 2MASS photometry, the ratio of the total to selective absorption, $R_V$, can be determined with an uncertainty of about 0.1 for most stars in high-extinction regions. These fits enable detailed studies of the dust properties and its spatial distribution, and of the stellar spatial distribution at low Galactic latitudes. Our results are in good agreement with the extinction normalization given by the Schlegel et al. (1998, SFD) dust maps at high northern Galactic latitudes, but indicate that the SFD extinction map appears to be consistently overestimated by about 20% in the southern sky, in agreement with Schlafly et al. (2010). The constraints on the shape of the dust extinction curve across the SDSS and 2MASS bandpasses support the models by Fitzpatrick (1999) and Cardelli et al. (1989). For the latter, we find an $R_V=3.0pm0.1$(random) $pm0.1$(systematic) over most of the high-latitude sky. At low Galactic latitudes (|b|<5), we demonstrate that the SFD map cannot be reliably used to correct for extinction as most stars are embedded in dust, rather than behind it. We introduce a method for efficient selection of candidate red giant stars in the disk, dubbed dusty parallax relation, which utilizes a correlation between distance and the extinction along the line of sight. We make these best-fit parameters, as well as all the input SDSS and 2MASS data, publicly available in a user-friendly format.
The $rho$ Oph molecular cloud is one of the best examples of spinning dust emission, first detected by the Cosmic Background Imager (CBI). Here we present 4.5 arcmin observations with CBI 2 that confirm 31 GHz emission from $rho$ Oph W, the PDR exposed to B-type star HD 147889, and highlight the absence of signal from S1, the brightest IR nebula in the complex. In order to quantify an association with dust-related emission mechanisms, we calculated correlations at different angular resolutions between the 31 GHz map and proxies for the column density of IR emitters, dust radiance and optical depth templates. We found that the 31 GHz emission correlates best with the PAH column density tracers, while the correlation with the dust radiance improves when considering emission that is more extended (from the shorter baselines), suggesting that the angular resolution of the observations affects the correlation results. A proxy for the spinning dust emissivity reveals large variations within the complex, with a dynamic range of 25 at 3$sigma$ and a variation by a factor of at least 23, at 3$sigma$, between the peak in $rho$ Oph W and the location of S1, which means that environmental factors are responsible for boosting spinning dust emissivities locally.