A Dynamical Constraint on Interstellar Dust Models from Radiative Torque Disruption

Interstellar dust models are facing a "carbon crisis", so called because recent observations suggest that the abundance of carbon available for dust in the interstellar medium is less than half of the amount required to be tied up in graphite grains in order to explain the interstellar extinction curve. This paper presents an detailed assessment of a newly-proposed dust model (Mathis 1996), in which the majority of the interstellar carbon is contained in composite and fluffy dust (CFD) grains. Per unit mass, these grains produce more UV extinction, and can therefore account for the interstellar extinction curve with about half the carbon required in traditional dust models. The results of our analysis show that the CFD model falls short in solving the carbon crisis, in providing a fit to the UV-optical interstellar extinction curve. It also predicts a far-infrared emissivity in excess of that observed with the COBE/DIRBE and FIRAS instruments from the diffuse interstellar medium. The failure of the new model highlights the interrelationships between the various dust properties and their observational consequences, and the need to satisfy them all simultaneously in any comprehensive interstellar dust model. In light of these problems, the paper examines other possible solutions to the carbon crisis.

The multiyear effort that identified the candidate interstellar grains was, in part, a triumph of citizen science.

Planets are known to grow out of a star-encircling disk of the gas and dust inherited from an interstellar cloud; their formation is thought to begin with coagulation of submicron dust grains into aggregates, the first foundational stage of planet formation. However, with nanoscale and submicron solids unobservable directly in the interstellar medium (ISM) and protoplanetary disks, how dust grains grow is unclear, as are the morphology and structure of interstellar grains and the whereabouts and form of “missing iron.” Here we show an elementary composite binary in 3D sub-10 nm detail—and the alignments of its two subunits and nanoinclusions and a population of elongated composite grains locked in a primitive cosmic dust particle—noninvasively uncovered with phase-contrast X-ray nanotomography. The binary comprises a pair of oblate, quasi-spheroidal grains whose alignment and shape meet the astrophysical constraints on polarizing interstellar grains. Each member of the pair contains a high-density core of octahedral nanocrystals whose twin relationship is consistent with the magnetite’s diagnostic property at low temperatures, with a mantle exhibiting nanoscale heterogeneities, rounded edges, and pitted surfaces. This elongated binary evidently formed from an axially aligned collision of the two similar composite grains whose core–mantle structure and density gradients are consistent with interstellar processes and astronomical evidence for differential depletion. Our findings suggest that the ISM is threaded with dust grains containing preferentially oriented iron-rich magnetic nanocrystals that hold answers to astronomical problems from dust evolution, grain alignment, and the structure of magnetic fields to planetesimal growth.

Recent observational and theoretical studies of dust in dense clouds are reviewed with an emphasis on the growth of dust grains through accretion and coagulation. IR reflection nebulae around protostellar objects are useful probes of grain sizes in dense clouds. For example, detailed studies of the IR reflection nebula surrounding OMC 2-IRS 1 show that the (scattering) grains are much larger (Ã 5000 å) than in the diffuse interstellar medium. Likewise, the presence of a weak shoulder at 2.95 μm on the 3.08 μm feature in BN indicates the importance of scattering by icy grains and implies a very similar increase in the grain size.Theoretical studies of grain surface chemistry predict the possible presence of three distinctly different grain mantle components in dense clouds depending on the physical conditions in the gas phase. These are: 1) A hydrogenated mantle dominated by H2O and CH3OH; 2) An inert grain mantle dominated by CO and O2; and 3) An oxidized grain mantle dominated by CO2. Although the importance of H2O dominated grain mantles was known for 10 yrs, the presence of CH3OH was only recently confirmed. Furthermore, recent studies of the solid CO band have revealed the presence of at least two distinctly different interstellar grain mantle components along the line of sights towards most stars: One dominated by polar and one by non-polar molecules. Although specific identification of the molecules mixed in with the CO in these components is difficult, it is quite possible that the former component is dominated by H2O and the latter by CO itself, as suggested by theoretical models. Finally, the photochemical evolution of icy grain mantles is briefly reviewed and it is suggested that the resulting complex molecular mantles may evolve into amorphous carbon mantles in the diffuse ISM.Grain-grain collisions can lead to large modifications of the interstellar grain size distribution. At high velocities (v ≳ 1 kms−1) shattering into many small fragments will be important, while at low velocities (v ≲ 10 ms−1) coagulation dominates. Both processes can play a role in dense molecular clouds. The sticking of grains at low velocities is discussed in some detail and it is concluded that coagulation in molecular clouds is only important if the colliding grains are covered by icy grain mantles.Thus, a model for interstellar dust is proposed in which small (≲ 500 å) silicate and carbonaceous grains are “glued” together in large (Ã 3000å), open conglomerates by a polymerized, all enveloping grain mantle. This structure resembles that of certain interplanetary dust particles collected in the upper stratosphere.

This paper presents a review of our current knowledge of interstellar dust. The composition of the interstellar dust is summarized in Table 1. About half of the dust volume consists of amorphous silicates. The other half has to be made up out of a carbonaceous component, such as graphite, amorphous carbon (e.g., soot), and/or organic grain mantles (e.g., mixed polymers). Presently it cannot be decided which of these carbonaceous components dominates the interstellar dust, but future observations which can settle this point are discussed. Some discussion is given of the similarities and differences between graphite and amorphous carbon. Other minor dust components, such as SiC and MgS, are probably also present in the interstellar medium. Inside dense molecular clouds icy grain mantles can be a very important dust component containing up to 40% of the available elemental carbon and oxygen. The evolution of dust in the interstellar medium is described and some important physical processes are outlined. This includes nucleation, condensation and coagulation of Stardust (e.g., silicates, graphite and soot) in the outflows from late-type stars and UV photolysis and transient heating of icy grain mantles forming organic grain mantles in the interstellar medium. The destruction of dust by interstellar shocks is also described. The short destruction timescales which result from analysis of this process form a serious problem for any interstellar dust model based on Stardust alone. Even those models in which the interstellar dust is mainly formed in the interstellar medium may face problems in explaining the measured silicate dust volume. The interrelationship between interstellar and interplanetary dust is briefly described and it is argued that interstellar Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon molecules (hereafter PAHs) have carried the measured deuterium enhancement of the carbonaceous meteorites into the solar nebula. Finally an unaltered interstellar dust origin for the Ca,Al-rich inclusions in meteorites is rejected. A general description of infrared spectroscopy is given and applied to observations of interstellar icy grain mantles. Recent 5–8µm Observations of compact objects embedded inside dense molecular clouds are described. They show absorption features near 6.0 and 6.85 µm whose shape and peak position vary from source to source. The relatively narrow features observed towards W33 A are identified with the OH and CH deformation modes in H 2O and alcohols (i.e., CH3OH). The much broader features observed towards Mon R2-IRS 2 imply that a more complex array of molecular subgroups are present. The observed band shapes indicate that aldehydes (e.g., H2CO) and possibly ketones (e.g., CH3COCH3) are important grain constituents in the grain mantles along the line of sight towards that source. Mineral identifications for the 6.0 and 6.85 µm absorption features are briefly discussed and it is concluded that minerals do not contribute appreciably to these bands. The identification of each of the molecules proposed to be present in interstellar icy grain mantles is reviewed and critical observations required to confirm some of them are pointed out. The molecular composition of icy grain mantles for several sources is summarized in Table 3. While interstellar icy grain mantles have a variable composition, the simplest spectra imply a composition given approximately by H2O/CH3OH/CO/NH3 ≃ 1/0.66/0.05/0.05.

This paper assesses the implications of a recent discovery (Jenkins 2009) that atomic oxygen is being depleted from diffuse interstellar gas at a rate that cannot be accounted for by its presence in silicate and metallic oxide particles. To place this discovery in context, the uptake of elemental O into dust is considered over a wide range of environments, from the tenuous intercloud gas and diffuse clouds sampled by the depletion observations to dense clouds where ice mantles and gaseous CO become important reservoirs of O. The distribution of O in these contrasting regions is quantified in terms of a common parameter, the mean number density of hydrogen. At the interface between diffuse and dense phases (just before the onset of ice mantle growth) as much as 160 ppm of the O abundance is unaccounted for. If this reservoir of depleted oxygen persists to higher densities it has implications for the oxygen budget in molecular clouds, where a shortfall of the same order is observed. Of various potential carriers, the most plausible appears to be a form of O-bearing carbonaceous matter similar to the organics found in cometary particles returned by the Stardust mission. The "organic refractory" model for interstellar dust is re-examined in the light of these findings, and it is concluded that further observations and laboratory work are needed to determine whether this class of material is present in quantities sufficient to account for a significant fraction of the unidentified depleted oxygen.

We present new interstellar dust models which have been derived by simultaneously fitting the far-ultraviolet to near-infrared extinction, the diffuse infrared (IR) emission and, unlike previous models, the elemental abundance constraints on the dust for different interstellar medium abundances, including solar, F and G star, and B star abundances. The fitting problem is a typical ill-posed inversion problem, in which the grain size distribution is the unknown, which we solve by using the method of regularization. The dust model contains various components: PAHs, bare silicate, graphite, and amorphous carbon particles, as well as composite particles containing silicate, organic refractory material, water ice, and voids. The optical properties of these components were calculated using physical optical constants. As a special case, we reproduce the Li & Draine (2001) results, however their model requires an excessive amount of silicon, magnesium, and iron to be locked up in dust: about 50 ppm (atoms per million of H atoms), significantly more than the upper limit imposed by solar abundances of these elements, about 34, 35, and 28 ppm, respectively. A major conclusion of this paper is that there is no unique interstellar dust model that simultaneously fits the observed extinction, diffuse IR emission, and abundances constraints.

A model of interstellar dust must satisfy two conditions: dust grains have to be of the reasonable structure and chemical composition and explain basic observations. The latter are the interstellar extinction law and the depletion of interstellar elements. In this work, a new model of composite dust grains is considered. To calculate cross-sections of such particles the exact theory of light scattering by multi-layered grains is used. The results of modeling are compared with observations of the interstellar extinction toward the stars z Oph and y 1 C Ori.

We present a model for interstellar extinction dust, in which we assume a bimodal distribution of extinction carriers, a dispersion of core–mantle grains, supplemented by a collection of PAHs in free molecular form. We use state–of–the–art methods to calculate the extinction due to macroscopic dust particles, and the absorption cross–sections of PAHs in four different charge states. While successfull for most of observed Galactic extinction curves, in few cases the model cannot provide reliable results. Paradoxically, these failures appear to be very promising, suggesting that the whole body of dust extinction features might be described within the cycle of carbon in the interstellar medium.

In order to test the silicate-core/organic-mantle model of galactic interstellar dust, we have performed spectropolarimetry of the 3.4 μm C–H bond stretch that is characteristic of aliphatic hydrocarbons, using the nucleus of the Seyfert 2 galaxy, NGC 1068, as a bright, dusty background source. Polarization calculations show that if the grains in NGC 1068 had the properties assigned by the core-mantle model to dust in the Galactic diffuse interstellar medium (ISM), they would cause a detectable rise in polarization over the 3.4 μm feature. No such increase is observed. We discuss modifications to the basic core-mantle model, such as changes in grain size or the existence of additional nonhydrocarbon aligned grain populations, that could better fit the observational evidence. However, we emphasize that the absence of polarization over the 3.4 μm band in NGC 1068—and, indeed, in every line of sight examined to date—can be readily explained by a population of small, unaligned carbonaceous grains with no physical connection to the silicates.

Constraints on interstellar dust models from extinction and spectro-polarimetry

Interstellar dust models

We have constructed a three‐dimensional model of the Galactic large‐scale infrared emission from dust associated with the molecular (H2), neutral atomic (H I), and extended low‐density ionized (H II) gas phases of the interstellar medium. The model incorporates a three‐dimensional map of the molecular and neutral atomic hydrogen gas distributions, derived from available 12CO and H I surveys by using the radial velocity information in the spectral lines as a distance indicator, and available 5 and 19 GHz radio‐continuum surveys to trace the column density of ionized gas. We have used the model to decompose the COBE Diffuse Infrared Background Experiment (DIRBE) 12–240 μm observations of the Galactic plane region (‖b‖<5°), from which the zodiacal‐light and stellar emission have been subtracted, into distinct emission components associated with each gas phase within selected ranges of galactocentric distance. An interstellar dust model was fit to the resulting far‐infrared spectra to derive the large‐scale properties of the dust associated with each gas phase. The implications of our results for proposed models of interstellar dust and the current picture of the Galactic large‐scale infrared emission are discussed.

The Planck survey provides unprecedented full-sky coverage of the submillimetre polarized emission from Galactic dust. In addition to the information on the direction of the Galactic magnetic field, this also brings new constraints on the properties of dust. The dust grains that emit the radiation seen by Planck in the submillimetre also extinguish and polarize starlight in the visible. Comparison of the polarization of the emission and of the interstellar polarization on selected lines of sight probed by stars provides unique new diagnostics of the emission and light scattering properties of dust, and therefore of the important dust model parameters, composition, size, and shape. Using ancillary catalogues of interstellar polarization and extinction of starlight, we obtain the degree of polarization, p V , and the optical depth in the V band to the star, V . Toward these stars we measure the submillimetre polarized intensity, P S , and total intensity, I S , in the Planck 353 GHz channel. We compare the column density measure in the visible, E(B -V), with that inferred from the Planck product map of the submillimetre dust optical depth and compare the polarization direction (position angle) in the visible with that in the submillimetre. For those lines of sight through the diffuse interstellar medium with comparable values of the estimated column density and polarization directions close to orthogonal, we correlate properties in the submillimetre and visible to find two ratios, R S/V = (P S /I S )/(p V / V ) and R P/p = P S /p V , the latter focusing directly on the polarization properties of the aligned grain population alone. We find R S/V = 4.2, with statistical and systematic uncertainties 0.2 and 0.3, respectively, and R P/p = 5.4 MJy sr -1 , with uncertainties 0.2 and 0.3 MJy sr -1 , respectively. Our estimate of R S/V is compatible with predictions based on a range of polarizing dust models that have been developed for the diffuse interstellar medium. This estimate provides new empirical validation of many of the common underlying assumptions of the models, but is not yet very discriminating among them. However, our estimate of R P/p is not compatible with predictions, which are too low by a factor of about 2.5. This more discriminating diagnostic, R P/p , indicates that changes to the optical properties in the models of the aligned grain population are required. These new diagnostics, together with the spectral dependence in the submillimetre from Planck, will be important for constraining and understanding the full complexity of the grain models, and for interpreting the Planck thermal dust polarization and refinement of the separation of this contamination of the cosmic microwave background.

Icy grains in the interstellar medium and star-formation regions consist of a variety of materials. Such composite grains interact differently with cosmic-ray (CR) particles compared to simple single-material grains. We aim to calculate the spectra of energies and temperatures of mixed-composition grains undergoing whole-grain heating by CRs. The grains were assumed to consist of a mixture of carbon and olivine, covered by ices consisting of carbon oxides and water. The energy and temperature spectra for grains with radii 0.05; 0.1, and 0.2 microns impacted by CRs were calculated for eight values of column density, relevant to molecular clouds and star-forming cores. The approach takes into account changes in ice thickness and composition with increasing column density. These detailed data for CR interaction with interstellar grains are intended for applications in astrochemical models. The main finding is that the a more accurate approach on grain heat capacity and other factors prevent a frequent heating of 0.1 micron or larger icy grains to high temperatures.