We employ an all-sky map of the anomalous microwave emission (AME) produced by component separation of the microwave sky to study correlations between the AME and Galactic dust properties. We find that while the AME is highly correlated with all trac
ers of dust emission, the best predictor of the AME strength is the dust radiance. Fluctuations in the AME intensity per dust radiance are uncorrelated with fluctuations in the emission from polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), casting doubt on the association between AME and PAHs. The PAH abundance is strongly correlated with the dust optical depth and dust radiance, consistent with PAH destruction in low density regions. We find that the AME intensity increases with increasing radiation field strength, at variance with predictions from the spinning dust hypothesis. Finally, the temperature-dependence of the AME per dust radiance disfavors the interpretation of the AME as thermal emission. A reconsideration of other AME carriers, such as ultrasmall silicates, and other emission mechanisms, such as magnetic dipole emission, is warranted.
We characterize the dust in NGC628 and NGC6946, two nearby spiral galaxies in the KINGFISH sample. With data from 3.6um to 500um, dust models are strongly constrained. Using the Draine & Li (2007) dust model, (amorphous silicate and carbonaceous grai
ns), for each pixel in each galaxy we estimate (1) dust mass surface density, (2) dust mass fraction contributed by polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH)s, (3) distribution of starlight intensities heating the dust, (4) total infrared (IR) luminosity emitted by the dust, and (5) IR luminosity originating in regions with high starlight intensity. We obtain maps for the dust properties, which trace the spiral structure of the galaxies. The dust models successfully reproduce the observed global and resolved spectral energy distributions (SEDs). The overall dust/H mass ratio is estimated to be 0.0082+/-0.0017 for NGC628, and 0.0063+/-0.0009 for NGC6946, consistent with what is expected for galaxies of near-solar metallicity. Our derived dust masses are larger (by up to a factor 3) than estimates based on single-temperature modified blackbody fits. We show that the SED fits are significantly improved if the starlight intensity distribution includes a (single intensity) delta function component. We find no evidence for significant masses of cold dust T<12K. Discrepancies between PACS and MIPS photometry in both low and high surface brightness areas result in large uncertainties when the modeling is done at PACS resolutions, in which case SPIRE, MIPS70 and MIPS160 data cannot be used. We recommend against attempting to model dust at the angular resolution of PACS.
