Low temperature MIR to submillimeter mass absorption coefficient of interstellar dust analogues I: Mg-rich glassy silicates


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A wealth of data from the Herschel and Planck satellites and now from ALMA, revealing cold dust thermal emission, is available for astronomical environments ranging from interstellar clouds, cold clumps, circumstellar envelops, and protoplanetary disks. The interpretation of these observations relies on the understanding and modeling of cold dust emission and on the knowledge of the dust optical properties. The aim of this work is to provide astronomers with a set of spectroscopic data of realistic interstellar dust analogues that can be used to interpret the observations. Glassy silicates of mean composition (1-x)MgO - xSiO2 with x = 0.35, 0.40 and 0.50 were synthesized. The mass absorption coefficient (MAC) of the samples was measured in the spectral domain 30 - 1000 $mu$m for grain temperature in the range 300 K - 10 K and at room temperature in the 5 - 40 $mu$m domain. We find that the MAC of all samples varies with the grains temperature. In the FIR/submm, and above 30K, the MAC value at a given wavelength increases with the temperature as thermally activated absorption processes appear. The studied materials exhibit different and complex behaviors at long wavelengths (lambda $geq$ 200 to 700 $mu$m depending on the samples) and the MAC cannot be approximated by a single power law in ${lambda}^{-beta}$. These behaviors are attributed to the amorphous nature of dust and to the amount and nature of the defects within this amorphous structure. Above 20 $mu$m, the measured MAC are much higher than the MAC calculated from interstellar silicate dust models indicating that the analogues measured in this study are more emissive than the silicates in cosmic dust models. This has important astrophysical implications because masses are overestimated by the models. Moreover, constraints on elemental abundance of heavy elements in cosmic dust models are relaxed

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