Kaksi katsausta tähtienväliseen pölyyn : lähi-infrapuna sironta ja polarisoitunut pölyn lämpösäteily

Interstellar clouds are not featureless, but show quite complex internal structures of filaments and clumps when observed with high enough resolution. These structures have been generated by 1) turbulent motions driven mainly by supernovae, 2) magnetic fields working on the ions and, through neutral-ion collisions, on neutral gas as well, and 3) self-gravity pulling a dense clump together to form a new star. The study of the cloud structure gives us information on the relative importance of each of these mechanisms, and helps us to gain a better understanding of the details of the star formation process. Interstellar dust is often used as a tracer for the interstellar gas which forms the bulk of the interstellar matter. Some of the methods that are used to derive the column density are summarized in this thesis. A new method, which uses the scattered light to map the column density in large fields with high spatial resolution, is introduced. This thesis also takes a look at the grain alignment with respect to the magnetic fields. The aligned grains give rise to the polarization of starlight and dust emission, thus revealing the magnetic field. The alignment mechanisms have been debated for the last half century. The strongest candidate at present is the radiative torques mechanism. In the first four papers included in this thesis, the scattered light method of column density estimation is formulated, tested in simulations, and finally used to obtain a column density map from observations. They demonstrate that the scattered light method is a very useful and reliable tool in column density estimation, and is able to provide higher resolution than the near-infrared color excess method. These two methods are complementary. The derived column density maps are also used to gain information on the dust emissivity within the observed cloud. The two final papers present simulations of polarized thermal dust emission assuming that the alignment happens by the radiative torques mechanism. We show that the radiative torques can explain the observed decline of the polarization degree towards dense cores. Furthermore, the results indicate that the dense cores themselves might not contribute significantly to the polarized signal, and hence one needs to be careful when interpreting the observations and deriving the magnetic field.Tähtienvälinen avaruus ei ole tyhjä. Iso osa tähtienvälisestä aineesta on keskittynyt pilviin, joilla on monimutkainen sisäinen rakenne: tiheämpiä säikeitä ja ytimiä harvemman aineen ympäröiminä. Nämä rakenteet ovat syntyneet vetovoiman, supernovien aikaansaaman turbulenttisen liikkeen ja magneettikenttien vuorovaikutuksesta. Rakenteiden yksityiskohdat kertovat näiden mekanismien osuuksista ja auttavat meitä ymmärtämään tähtien syntyprosesseja. Tähtienvälinen aine koostuu kaasusta ja pölystä. Näkösäteellä olevan tähtienvälisen pölyn, ja siten aineen, määrää voidaan arvoida eri tavoin. Tässä väitöskirjassa esitellään uusi, lupaava menetelmä. Alunperin tähdistä peräisin olleen valon siroaminen pölyhiukkasista saa tähtienväliset pilvet loistamaan lähi-infrapunassa, ja tämä kirkkaus riippuu näkösäteellä olevan pölyn määrästä. Lähi-infrapunavalon sirontaan perustuva menetelmä on osoittautunut luotettavaksi tavaksi arvoida pölyn määrää, ja sen avulla on mahdollista mitata pienempiä rakenteita kuin tähtiä käyttävillä menetelmillä. Toinen osa väitöskirjaa on pölyn polarisoitunut säteily, jonka avulla saadaan tietoa tähtienvälisten pilvien magneettikentistä. Polarisoitunut säteily tarkoittaa sitä, että magneettikentän mukaisesti pyörivät pölyhiukkaset säteilevät tehokkaammin pituusakselinsa suuntaisesti kuin lyhyemmän pyörimisakselinsa suuntaisesti. Tämä lisäsäteilyn kulma taivaalla voidaan mitata ja tästä saadaan selville magneettikentän suunta. Magneettikentän suunnan vaihteluista voidaan arvioida sen voimakkuus. Vielä ei tiedetä varmasti, mitkä mekanismit ovat pölyhiukkasten suuntautumisen takana. Nykyään vahvin kandidaatti on valon aiheuttama vääntömomentti. Tässä väitöskirjassa esitetään tuloksia tietokonemalleista lasketulle polarisoituneelle säteilylle, olettaen suuntautumisen tapahtuvan valon vääntömomentin vuoksi. Tämä mekanismi tuottaa havaintojen kaltaisia tuloksia, mutta tiheissä pilviytimissä pölyhiukkaset eivät ole hyvin suuntautuneita ja eivät vaikuta havaittuun polarisaatioon merkittävästi. Täten havaitusta polarisaatiosta ei voi määrittää suoraviivaisesti pilviydinten magneettikenttää, joka on tärkeä pilven romahtamisen ja siten tähtien synnyn kannalta

Can we trace very cold dust from its emission alone ?

Context. Dust is a good tracer of cold dark clouds but its column density is difficult to quantify. Aims. We want to check whether the far-infrared and submillimeter high-resolution data from Herschel SPIRE and PACS cameras combined with ground-based telescope bolometers allow us to retrieve the whole dust content of cold dark clouds. Methods. We compare far-infrared and submillimeter emission across L183 to the 8 $\mu$m absorption map from Spitzer data and fit modified blackbody functions towards three different positions. Results. We find that none of the Herschel SPIRE channels follow the cold dust profile seen in absorption. Even the ground-based submillimeter telescope observations, although more closely following the absorption profile, cannot help to characterize the cold dust without external information such as the dust column density itself. The difference in dust opacity can reach up to a factor of 3 in prestellar cores of high extinction. Conclusions. In dark clouds, the amount of very cold dust cannot be measured from its emission alone. In particular, studies of dark clouds based only on Herschel data can miss a large fraction of the dust content. This has an impact on core and filament density profiles, masse and stability estimates.Comment: Letter to A&A (accepted for publication). must be viewed with ACROBAT READER for full enhancement. Otherwise, check images in Appendix

Dust emission, extinction, and scattering in LDN 1642

Context. LDN 1642 is a rare example of a star-forming, high-latitude molecular cloud. The dust emission of LDN 1642 has already been studied extensively in the past, but its location also makes it a good target for studies of light scattering.Aims. We wish to study the near-infrared (NIR) light scattering in LDN 1642, its correlation with the cloud structure, and the ability of dust models to simultaneously explain observations of sub-millimetre dust emission, NIR extinction, and NIR scattering.Methods. We used observations made with the HAWK-I instrument to measure the NIR surface brightness and extinction in LDN 1642. These data were compared with Herschel observations of dust emission and, with the help of radiative transfer modelling, with the predictions calculated for different dust models.Results. We find, for LDN 1642, an optical depth ratio tau (250 mu m)/tau (J) approximate to 10(-3), confirming earlier findings of enhanced sub-millimetre emissivity. The relationships between the column density derived from dust emission and the NIR colour excesses are linear and consistent with the shape of the standard NIR extinction curve. The extinction peaks at A(J) = 2.6 mag, and the NIR surface brightness remains correlated with N(H-2) without saturation. Radiative transfer models are able to fit the sub-millimetre data with any of the tested dust models. However, these predict an NIR extinction that is higher and an NIR surface brightness that is lower than based on NIR observations. If the dust sub-millimetre emissivity is rescaled to the observed value of tau (250 mu m)/tau (J), dust models with high NIR albedo can reach the observed level of NIR surface brightness. The NIR extinction of the models tends to be higher than in the direct extinction measurements, which is also reflected in the shape of the NIR surface brightness spectra.Conclusions. The combination of emission, extinction, and scattering measurements provides strong constraints on dust models. The observations of LDN 1642 indicate clear dust evolution, including a strong increase in the sub-millimetre emissivity, which has not been fully explained by the current dust models yet.Peer reviewe

Synthetic observations of dust emission and polarisation of Galactic cold clumps

Context. The Planck Catalogue of Galactic Cold Clumps (PGCC) contains over 13 000 sources that are detected based on their cold dust signature. They are believed to consist of a mixture of quiescent, pre-stellar, and already star-forming objects within molecular clouds. Aims. We extracted PGCC-type objects from cloud simulations and examined their physical and polarisation properties. The comparison with the PGCC catalogue helps to characterise the properties of this large sample of Galactic objects and, conversely, provides valuable tests for numerical simulations of large volumes of the interstellar medium and the evolution towards pre-stellar cores. Methods. We used several magnetohydrodynamical simulation snapshots to define the density field of our model clouds. Sub-millimetre images of the surface brightness and polarised signal were obtained with radiative transfer calculations. We examined the statistics of synthetic cold clump catalogues extracted with methods similar to the PGCC. We also examined the variations of the polarisation fraction p in the clumps. Results. The clump sizes, aspect ratios, and temperatures in the synthetic catalogue are similar to the PGCC. The fluxes and column densities of synthetic clumps are smaller by a factor of a few. Rather than with an increased dust opacity, this could be explained by increasing the average column density of the model by a factor of two to three, close to N(H-2) = 10(22) cm(-2). When the line of sight is parallel to the mean magnetic field, the polarisation fraction tends to increase towards the clump centres, which is contrary to observations. When the field is perpendicular, the polarisation fraction tends to decrease towards the clumps, but the drop in p is small (e.g. from p similar to 8% to p similar to 7%). Conclusions. Magnetic field geometry reduces the polarisation fraction in the simulated clumps by only Delta p similar to 1% on average. The larger drop seen towards the actual PGCC clumps therefore suggests some loss of grain alignment in the dense medium, such as predicted by the radiative torque mechanism. The statistical study is not able to quantify dust opacity changes at the scale of the PGCC clumps.Peer reviewe

The Effect of Supernovae on the Turbulence and Dispersal of Molecular Clouds

While the importance of supernova feedback in galaxies is well established, its role on the scale of molecular clouds is still debated. In this work, we focus on the impact of supernovae on individual clouds, using a high-resolution magneto-hydrodynamic simulation of a region of 250 pc where we resolve the formation of individual massive stars. The supernova feedback is implemented with real supernovae that are the natural evolution of the resolved massive stars, so their position and timing are self-consistent. We select a large sample of molecular clouds from the simulation to investigate the supernova energy injection and the resulting properties of molecular clouds. We find that molecular clouds have a lifetime of a few dynamical times, less then half of them contract to the point of becoming gravitationally bound, and the dispersal time of bound clouds, of order one dynamical time, is a factor of two shorter than that of unbound clouds. We stress the importance of internal supernovae, that is massive stars that explode inside their parent cloud, in setting the cloud dispersal time, and their huge overdensity compared to models where the supernovae are randomly distributed. We also quantify the energy injection efficiency of supernovae as a function of supernova distance to the clouds. We conclude that intermittent driving by supernovae can maintain molecular-cloud turbulence and may be the main process of cloud dispersal. The role of supernovae in the evolution of molecular clouds cannot be fully accounted for without a self-consistent implementation of their feedback.Comment: 33 pages, 23 figures, submitted to Ap

Physical properties and real nature of massive clumps in the galaxy

Systematic surveys of massive clumps have been carried out to study the conditions leading to the formation of massive stars. These clumps are typically at large distances and unresolved, so their physical properties cannot be reliably derived from the observations alone. Numerical simulations are needed to interpret the observations. To this end, we generate synthetic Herschel observations using our large-scale star-formation simulation, where massive stars explode as supernovae driving the interstellar-medium turbulence. From the synthetic observations, we compile a catalogue of compact sources following the exact same procedure as for the Hi-GAL compact source catalogue. We show that the sources from the simulation have observational properties with statistical distributions consistent with the observations. By relating the compact sources from the synthetic observations to their 3D counterparts in the simulation, we find that the synthetic observations overestimate the clump masses by about an order of magnitude on average due to line-of-sight projection, and projection effects are likely to be even worse for Hi-GAL Inner Galaxy sources. We also find that a large fraction of sources classified as protostellar are likely to be starless, and propose a new method to partially discriminate between true and false protostellar sources.Peer reviewe

The dynamical state of massive clumps

The dynamical state of massive clumps is key to our understanding of the formation of massive stars. In this work, we study the kinematic properties of massive clumps using synthetic observations. We have previously compiled a very large catalogue of synthetic dust-continuum compact sources from our 250 pc, SN-driven, star formation simulation. Here, we compute synthetic N2H+ line profiles for a subsample of those sources and compare their properties with the observations and with those of the corresponding three-dimensional (3D) clumps in the simulation. We find that the velocity dispersion of the sources estimated from the N2H+ line is a good estimate of that of the 3D clumps, although its correlation with the source size is weaker than the velocity-size correlation of the 3D clumps. The relation between the mass of the 3D clumps, M-main, and that of the corresponding synthetic sources, M-SED, has a large scatter and a slope of 0.5, M-main proportional to M-SED(0.5), due to uncertainties arising from the observational band-merging procedure and from projection effects along the line of sight. As a result, the virial parameters of the 3D clumps are not correlated with the clump masses, even if a negative correlation is found for the compact sources, and the virial parameter of the most massive sources may significantly underestimate that of the associated clumps.Peer reviewe

ALMA Survey of Orion Planck Galactic Cold Clumps (ALMASOP) : Evidence for a Molecular Jet Launched at an Unprecedented Early Phase of Protostellar Evolution

Protostellar outflows and jets play a vital role in star formation as they carry away excess angular momentum from the inner disk surface, allowing the material to be transferred toward the central protostar. Theoretically, low-velocity and poorly collimated outflows appear from the beginning of the collapse at the first hydrostatic core (FHSC) stage. With growing protostellar core mass, high-density jets are launched, entraininf an outflow from the infalling envelope. Until now, molecular jets have been observed at high velocity (greater than or similar to 100 km s(-1)) in early Class 0 protostars. We, for the first time, detect a dense molecular jet in SiO emission with low velocity (similar to 4.2 km s(-1), deprojected similar to 24 km s(-1)) from source G208.89-20.04Walma (hereafter G208Walma) using ALMA Band 6 observations. This object has some characteristics of FHSCs, such as a small outflow/jet velocity, extended 1.3 mm continuum emission, and N2D+ line emission. Additional characteristics, however, are typical of early protostars: collimated outflow and SiO jet. The full extent of the outflow corresponds to a dynamical timescale of similar to 930(-100)(+200) yr. The spectral energy distribution also suggests a very young source having an upper limit of T-bol similar to 31 K and L-bol similar to 0.8 L-circle dot. We conclude that G208Walma is likely in the transition phase from FHSC to protostar, and the molecular jet has been launched within a few hundred years of initial collapse. Therefore, G208Walma may be the earliest object discovered in the protostellar phase with a molecular jet.Peer reviewe

ALMA Survey of Orion Planck Galactic Cold Clumps (ALMASOP). II. Survey Overview : A First Look at 1.3 mm Continuum Maps and Molecular Outflows

Planck Galactic Cold Clumps (PGCCs) are considered to be the ideal targets to probe the early phases of star formation. We have conducted a survey of 72 young dense cores inside PGCCs in the Orion complex with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) at 1.3 mm (band 6) using three different configurations (resolutions similar to 035, 10, and 70) to statistically investigate their evolutionary stages and substructures. We have obtained images of the 1.3 mm continuum and molecular line emission ((CO)-C-12, and SiO) at an angular resolution of similar to 035 (similar to 140 au) with the combined arrays. We find 70 substructures within 48 detected dense cores with median dust mass similar to 0.093 M and deconvolved size similar to 027. Dense substructures are clearly detected within the central 1000 au of four candidate prestellar cores. The sizes and masses of the substructures in continuum emission are found to be significantly reduced with protostellar evolution from Class 0 to Class I. We also study the evolutionary change in the outflow characteristics through the course of protostellar mass accretion. A total of 37 sources exhibit CO outflows, and 20 (>50%) show high-velocity jets in SiO. The CO velocity extents (Delta Vs) span from 4 to 110 km s(-1) with outflow cavity opening angle width at 400 au ranging from [Theta(obs)](400) similar to 06-39, which corresponds to 334-1257. For the majority of the outflow sources, the Delta Vs show a positive correlation with [Theta(obs)](400), suggesting that as protostars undergo gravitational collapse, the cavity opening of a protostellar outflow widens and the protostars possibly generate more energetic outflows.Peer reviewe