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Register a new userAn Empirical Relation between Sodium Absorption and Dust Extinction
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Dust extinction and reddening are ubiquitous in astronomical observations and are often a major source of systematic uncertainty. We present here a study of the correlation between extinction in the Milky Way and the equivalent width of the NaI D absorption doublet. Our sample includes more than 100 high resolution spectra from the KECK telescopes and nearly a million low resolution spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). We measure the correlation to unprecedented precision, constrain its shape, and derive an empirical relation between these quantities with a dispersion of order 0.15 magnitude in E(B-V). From the shape of the curve of growth we further show that a typical sight line through the Galaxy, as seen within the SDSS footprint, crosses about three dust clouds. We provide a brief guide on how to best estimate extinction to extragalactic sources such as supernovae, using the NaI D absorption feature, under a variety of circumstances.
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HYPERION is a new three-dimensional dust continuum Monte-Carlo radiative transfer code that is designed to be as generic as possible, allowing radiative transfer to be computed through a variety of three-dimensional grids. The main part of the code is problem-independent, and only requires an arbitrary three-dimensional density structure, dust properties, the position and properties of the illuminating sources, and parameters controlling the running and output of the code. HYPERION is parallelized, and is shown to scale well to thousands of processes. Two common benchmark models for protoplanetary disks were computed, and the results are found to be in excellent agreement with those from other codes. Finally, to demonstrate the capabilities of the code, dust temperatures, SEDs, and synthetic multi-wavelength images were computed for a dynamical simulation of a low-mass star formation region. HYPERION is being actively developed to include new features, and is publicly available (http://www.hyperion-rt.org).
Recent observations have revealed that some Type Ia supernovae exhibit narrow, time-variable Na I D absorption features. The origin of the absorbing material is controversial, but it may suggest the presence of circumstellar gas in the progenitor system prior to the explosion, with significant implications for the nature of the supernova progenitors. We present the third detection of such variable absorption, based on six epochs of high-resolution spectroscopy of the Type Ia supernova SN 2007le from Keck and the HET. The data span ~3 months, from 5 days before maximum light to 90 days after maximum. We find that one component of the Na D absorption lines strengthened significantly with time, indicating a total column density increase of ~2.5 x 10^12 cm^-2. The changes are most prominent after maximum light rather than at earlier times when the UV flux from the SN peaks. As with SN 2006X, we detect no change in the Ca II H&K lines over the same time period, rendering line-of-sight effects improbable and suggesting a circumstellar origin for the absorbing material. Unlike the previous two SNe exhibiting variable absorption, SN 2007le is not highly reddened (E_B-V = 0.27 mag), also pointing toward circumstellar rather than interstellar absorption. Photoionization models show that the data are consistent with a dense (10^7 cm^-3) cloud or clouds of gas located ~0.1 pc from the explosion. These results broadly support the single-degenerate scenario previously proposed to explain the variable absorption, with mass loss from a nondegenerate companion star responsible for providing the circumstellar gas. We also present tentative evidence for narrow Halpha emission associated with the SN, which will require followup observations at late times to confirm. [abridged]
A cryogenic achromatic half-wave plate (HWP) for submillimetre astronomical polarimetry has been designed, manufactured, tested, and deployed in the Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Submillimeter Telescope for Polarimetry (BLASTPol). The design is based on the five-slab Pancharatnam recipe and it works in the wavelength range 200-600 micron, making it the broadest-band HWP built to date at (sub)millimetre wavelengths. The frequency behaviour of the HWP has been fully characterised at room and cryogenic temperatures with incoherent radiation from a polarising Fourier transform spectrometer. We develop a novel empirical model, complementary to the physical and analytical ones available in the literature, that allows us to recover the HWP Mueller matrix and phase shift as a function of frequency and extrapolated to 4K. We show that most of the HWP non-idealities can be modelled by quantifying one wavelength-dependent parameter, the position of the HWP equivalent axes, which is then readily implemented in a map-making algorithm. We derive this parameter for a range of spectral signatures of input astronomical sources relevant to BLASTPol, and provide a benchmark example of how our method can yield improved accuracy on measurements of the polarisation angle on the sky at submillimetre wavelengths.
We address the problem of evaluating the power spectrum of the velocity field of the ICM using only information on the plasma density fluctuations, which can be measured today by Chandra and XMM-Newton observatories. We argue that for relaxed clusters there is a linear relation between the rms density and velocity fluctuations across a range of scales, from the largest ones, where motions are dominated by buoyancy, down to small, turbulent scales: $(deltarho_k/rho)^2 = eta_1^2 (V_{1,k}/c_s)^2$, where $deltarho_k/rho$ is the spectral amplitude of the density perturbations at wave number $k$, $V_{1,k}^2=V_k^2/3$ is the mean square component of the velocity field, $c_s$ is the sound speed, and $eta_1$ is a dimensionless constant of order unity. Using cosmological simulations of relaxed galaxy clusters, we calibrate this relation and find $eta_1approx 1 pm 0.3$. We argue that this value is set at large scales by buoyancy physics, while at small scales the density and velocity power spectra are proportional because the former are a passive scalar advected by the latter. This opens an interesting possibility to use gas density power spectra as a proxy for the velocity power spectra in relaxed clusters, across a wide range of scales.
The large majority of extinction sight lines in our Galaxy obey a simple relation depending on one parameter, the total-to-selective extinction coefficient, Rv. Different values of Rv are able to match the whole extinction curve through different environments so characterizing normal extinction curves. In this paper more than sixty curves with large ultraviolet deviations from their best-fit one parameter curve are analyzed. These curves are fitted with dust models to shed light into the properties of the grains, the processes affecting them, and their relations with the environmental characteristics. The extinction curve models are reckoned by following recent prescriptions on grain size distributions able to describe one parameter curves for Rv values from 3.1 to 5.5. Such models, here extended down to Rv=2.0, allow us to compare the resulting properties of our deviating curves with the same as normal curves in a self-consistent framework, and thus to recover the relative trends overcoming the modeling uncertainties. Such curves represent the larger and homogeneous sample of anomalous curves studied so far with dust models. Results show that the ultraviolet deviations are driven by a larger amount of small grains than predicted for lines of sight where extinction depends on one parameter only. Moreover, the dust-to-gas ratios of anomalous curves are lower than the same values for no deviating lines of sight. Shocks and grain-grain collisions should both destroy dust grains, so reducing the amount of the dust trapped into the grains, and modify the size distribution of the dust, so increasing the small-to-large grain size ratio. Therefore, the extinction properties derived should arise along sight lines where shocks and high velocity flows perturb the physical state of the interstellar medium living their signature on the dust properties. (Abridged version)
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