55 research outputs found
Planck intermediate results. XII: Diffuse Galactic components in the Gould Belt system
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Planck intermediate results XXV : The Andromeda galaxy as seen by Planck
Get PDFThe Andromeda galaxy (M 31) is one of a few galaxies that has sufficient angular size on the sky to be resolved by the Planck satellite. Planck has detected M 31 in all of its frequency bands, and has mapped out the dust emission with the High Frequency Instrument, clearly resolving multiple spiral arms and sub-features. We examine the morphology of this long-wavelength dust emission as seen by Planck, including a study of its outermost spiral arms, and investigate the dust heating mechanism across M 31. We find that dust dominating the longer wavelength emission (greater than or similar to 0.3 mm) is heated by the diffuse stellar population (as traced by 3.6 mu m emission), with the dust dominating the shorter wavelength emission heated by a mix of the old stellar population and star-forming regions (as traced by 24 mu m emission). We also fit spectral energy distributions for individual 5' pixels and quantify the dust properties across the galaxy, taking into account these different heating mechanisms, finding that there is a linear decrease in temperature with galactocentric distance for dust heated by the old stellar population, as would be expected, with temperatures ranging from around 22 K in the nucleus to 14 K outside of the 10 kpc ring. Finally, we measure the integrated spectrum of the whole galaxy, which we find to be well-fitted with a global dust temperature of (18.2 +/- 1.0) K with a spectral index of 1.62 +/- 0.11 (assuming a single modified blackbody), and a significant amount of free-free emission at intermediate frequencies of 20-60 GHz, which corresponds to a star formation rate of around 0.12 M-circle dot yr(-1). We find a 2.3 sigma detection of the presence of spinning dust emission, with a 30 GHz amplitude of 0.7 +/- 0.3 Jy, which is in line with expectations from our Galaxy.Peer reviewe
Planck intermediate results. L. Evidence of spatial variation of the polarized thermal dust spectral energy distribution and implications for CMB B-mode analysis
Get PDFThe characterization of the Galactic foregrounds has been shown to be the main obstacle in thechallenging quest to detect primordial B-modes in the polarized microwave sky. We make use of the Planck-HFI 2015 data release at high frequencies to place new constraints on the properties of the polarized thermal dust emission at high Galactic latitudes. Here, we specifically study the spatial variability of the dust polarized spectral energy distribution (SED), and its potential impact on the determination of the tensor-to-scalar ratio, r. We use the correlation ratio of the CBBâ angular power spectra between the 217 and 353âGHz channels as a tracer of these potential variations, computed on different high Galactic latitude regions, ranging from 80% to 20% of the sky. The new insight from Planck data is a departure of the correlation ratio from unity that cannot be attributed to a spurious decorrelation due to the cosmic microwave background, instrumental noise, or instrumental systematics. The effect is marginally detected on each region, but the statistical combination of all the regions gives more than 99% confidence for this variation in polarized dust properties. In addition, we show that the decorrelation increases when there is a decrease in the mean column density of the region of the sky being considered, and we propose a simple power-law empirical model for this dependence, which matches what is seen in the Planck data. We explore the effect that this measured decorrelation has on simulations of the BICEP2-Keck Array/Planck analysis and show that the 2015 constraints from these data still allow a decorrelation between the dust at 150 and 353âGHz that is compatible with our measured value. Finally, using simplified models, we show that either spatial variation of the dust SED or of the dust polarization angle are able to produce decorrelations between 217 and 353âGHz data similar to the values we observe in the data
Planck intermediate results XXVIII. Interstellar gas and dust in the Chamaeleon clouds as seen by Fermi LAT and Planck
Get PDFThe nearby Chamaeleon clouds have been observed in gamma rays by the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) and in thermal dust emission by Planck and IRAS. Cosmic rays and large dust grains, if smoothly mixed with gas, can jointly serve with the Hi and (CO)-C-12 radio data to (i) map the hydrogen column densities, N-H, in the different gas phases, in particular at the dark neutral medium (DNM) transition between the H I-bright and CO-bright media; (ii) constrain the CO-to-H-2 conversion factor, X-CO; and (iii) probe the dust properties per gas nucleon in each phase and map their spatial variations across the clouds. We have separated clouds at local, intermediate, and Galactic velocities in H i and (1)2CO line emission to model in parallel the gamma-ray intensity recorded between 0.4 and 100 GeV; the dust optical depth at 353 GHz, tau(353); the thermal radiance of the large grains; and an estimate of the dust extinction, A(VQ), empirically corrected for the starlight intensity. The dust and gamma-models have been coupled to account for the DNM gas. The consistent gamma-emissivity spectra recorded in the different phases confirm that the GeV-TeV cosmic rays probed by the LAT uniformly permeate all gas phases up to the (CO)-C-12 cores. The dust and cosmic rays both reveal large amounts of DNM gas, with comparable spatial distributions and twice as much mass as in the CO-bright clouds. We give constraints on the H I-DNM-CO transitions for five separate clouds. CO-dark H-2 dominates the molecular columns up to A(V) similar or equal to 0.9 and its mass often exceeds the one-third of the molecular mass expected by theory. The corrected A(VQ) extinction largely provides the best fit to the total gas traced by the gamma rays. Nevertheless, we find evidence for a marked rise in A(VQ)/N-H with increasing N-H and molecular fraction, and with decreasing dust temperature. The rise in tau(353)/N-H is even steeper. We observe variations of lesser amplitude and orderliness for the specific power of the grains, except for a coherent decline by half in the CO cores. This combined information suggests grain evolution. We provide average values for the dust properties per gas nucleon in the different phases. The gamma rays and dust radiance yield consistent X-CO estimates near 0.7 x 10(20) cm(-2) K-1 km(-1) s. The A(VQ) and tau(353) tracers yield biased values because of the large rise in grain opacity in the CO clouds. These results clarify a recurrent disparity in the gamma-versus dust calibration of X-CO, but they confirm the factor of 2 difference found between the X-CO estimates in nearby clouds and in the neighbouring spiral arms.Peer reviewe
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