Ориентация космических пылинок

Abstract

The orientation of nonspherical cosmic dust grains is found in the anisotropic corpuscular or radiation fluxes and in the presence of the magnetic field; the grains being approximated by the axially-symmetrical ellipsoids. The comparatively small twisting is shown to cause the difference in scattering of the right and left circular-polarized light and the increasing of the angular momentum. If the period of the angular momentum precession caused by the magnetic field is less than the time of the orientation by the corpuscular or radiation fluxes, then the distribution of the grains' axes gets the symmetry relative to the field direction. It is shown that such orientation realized in our Galaxy allows us to explain easily the interstellar linear polarization observed. The mechanisms of the grains' orientation near the infrared source Becklin-Neugebauer, in the B 96 cloud near RY Tau and in the comet Bennett are discussed.