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arXiv · 1205.4078

Properties of dust in the Galactic center region probed by AKARI far-infrared spectral mapping - detection of a dust feature

H. Kaneda·A. Yasuda·T. Onaka·M. Kawada·N. Murakami·T. Nakagawa·Y. Okada·H. Takahashi
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Abstract

We investigate the properties of interstellar dust in the Galactic center region toward the Arches and Quintuplet clusters. With the Fourier Transform Spectrometer of the AKARI/Far-Infrared Surveyor, we performed the far-infrared (60 - 140 cm^-1) spectral mapping of an area of about 10' x 10' which includes the two clusters to obtain a low-resolution (R = 1.2 cm^-1) spectrum at every spatial bin of 30" x 30". We derive the spatial variations of dust continuum emission at different wavenumbers, which are compared with those of the [O III] 88 micron (113 cm^-1) emission and the OH 119 micron (84 cm^-1) absorption. The spectral fitting shows that two dust modified blackbody components with temperatures of ~20 K and ~50 K can reproduce most of the continuum spectra. For some spectra, however, we find that there exists a significant excess on top of a modified blackbody continuum around 80 - 90 cm^-1 (110 - 130 microns). The warmer dust component is spatially correlated well with the [O III] emission and hence likely to be associated with the highly-ionized gas locally heated by intense radiation from the two clusters. The excess emission probably represents a dust feature, which is found to be spatially correlated with the OH absorption and a CO cloud. We find that a dust model including micron-sized graphite grains can reproduce the observed spectrum with the dust feature fairly well.

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H. Kaneda, A. Yasuda, T. Onaka, M. Kawada, N. Murakami, T. Nakagawa, Y. Okada, H. Takahashi. 2012-05-18. Properties of dust in the Galactic center region probed by AKARI far-infrared spectral mapping - detection of a dust feature. https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361%2F201219238

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