Interstellar Extinction and Elemental Abundances: Individual Sight Lines

Abstract

Abstract While it is well recognized that both the Galactic interstellar extinction curves and the gas-phase abundances of dust-forming elements exhibit considerable variations from one sight line to another, as yet most of the dust extinction modeling efforts have been directed to the Galactic average extinction curve, which is obtained by averaging over many clouds of different gas and dust properties. Therefore, any details concerning the relationship between the dust properties and the interstellar environments are lost. Here we utilize the wealth of extinction and elemental abundance data obtained by space telescopes and explore the dust properties of a large number of individual sight lines. We model the observed extinction curve of each sight line and derive the abundances of the major dust-forming elements (i.e., C, O, Si, Mg, and Fe) required to be tied up in dust (i.e., dust depletion). We then confront the derived dust depletions with the observed gas-phase abundances of these elements and investigate the environmental effects on the dust properties and elemental depletions. It is found that for the majority of the sight lines the interstellar oxygen atoms are fully accommodated by gas and dust and therefore there does not appear to be a “missing oxygen” problem. For those sight lines with an extinction-to-hydrogen column density A V /N H ≳ 4.8 × 10−22 mag cm2 H−1 there are shortages of C, Si, Mg, and Fe elements for making dust to account for the observed extinction, even if the interstellar C/H, Si/H, Mg/H, and Fe/H abundances are assumed to be protosolar abundances augmented by Galactic chemical evolution.