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Register a new userDust in the Wheel: The Cartwheel Galaxy in the Mid-IR
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Added by
Vassilis Charmandaris
Publication date
1998
fields
Physics
and research's language is
English
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We present mid-infrared images at $6.7 mu m$ and $15 mu m$ of ``The Cartwheel (AM~0035-33), the prototypical collisional ring galaxy. The observations, taken with ISOCAM, reveal the distribution of hot dust in the galaxy and its two companions in the north-east. The intensity of the mid-IR emission from the outer star forming ring of the Cartwheel shows considerable azimuthal variation and peaks at the most active H$alpha$ region of the ring. The 15 $mu m$ to 6.7 $mu m$ flux ratio of 5.2 is the highest among all the galaxies of our sample. A surprising result of our observations is the discovery of significant emission from the inner regions of the galaxy, including the inner ring, spokes and nucleus, where previously only low level H$alpha$ emission had been reported. At 6.7 $mu m$, this emission is stronger than the one from the outer star forming ring, and at 15 $mu m$, it represents 40% of the emission from the outer ring. The H$alpha$ to mid-IR flux ratios from the inner regions are consistent with the heating of grains from weak star formation activity.
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Because the 8 {mu}m polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) emission has been found to correlate with other well-known star formation tracers, it has widely been used as a star formation rate (SFR) tracer. There are, however, studies that challenge the accuracy and reliability of the 8 {mu}m emission as a SFR tracer. Our study, part of the Herschel M33 Extended Survey (HERM33ES) open time key program, aims at addressing this issue by analyzing the infrared emission from the nearby spiral galaxy M33 at the high spatial scale of 75 pc. Combining data from the Herschel Space Observatory and the Spitzer Space Telescope we find that the 8 {mu}m emission is better correlated with the 250 {mu}m emission, which traces cold interstellar gas, than with the 24 {mu}m emission. The L(8)/L(24) ratio is highly depressed in 24 {mu}m luminous regions, which correlate with known HII regions. We also compare our results with the dust emission models by Draine & Li (2007). We confirm that the depression of 8 {mu}m PAH emission near star-forming regions is higher than what is predicted by models; this is possibly an effect of increased stellar radiation from young stars destroying the dust grains responsible for the 8 {mu}m emission as already suggested by other authors. We find that the majority of the 8 {mu}m emission is fully consistent with heating by the diffuse interstellar medium, similar to what recently determined for the dust emission in M31 by Draine at al. (2013). We also find that the fraction of 8 {mu}m emission associated with the diffuse interstellar radiation field ranges between 60% and 80% and is 40% larger than the diffuse fraction at 24 {mu}m.
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