The Si K Edge Gas and Dust Optical Depths Toward the Galactic Bulge

Abstract

Knowledge of the dust content in interstellar matter is important to our understanding of the composition and evolution of the interstellar medium. The Chandra High Energy Transmission Grating (HETG) Spectrometer provides a unique opportunity to measure X-ray absorption of interstellar dust and its compositions through the X-ray edge absorption structure. We measure gas and dust optical depths at Si K toward nine bright low-mass x-ray binaries in the Galactic Bulge with very high-precision and pileup-free spectra. We include a likely instrumental feature affecting the Si K edge structure in our analysis. While gas optical depths grow consistently with broadband hydrogen-equivalent columns, the dust optical depths do not. Calculations including dust self-shielding show that the observed dust optical depths can be explained by variations in dust grain columns between various lines of sight. At least three grain column regimes can be identified toward the Galactic Bulge. While grain sizes define the self-shielding effect, variations in grain size distributions do not seem relevant. This shows that the gas-to-dust optical depth ratio toward sources in the Galactic Bulge is not homogeneous. The dust optical depths also roughly correlate with molecular hydrogen columns. Lowly ionized Si K contributions toward the Galactic Bulge were detected but are very small. We also find Si xiii absorption with velocity widths of 800–1100 km s−1, which we attribute to the circumbinary medium.