SearcharxivSearch

arXiv · astro-ph/9902356

Microwave Emission from Galactic Dust Grains

Abstract

Observations of the cosmic microwave background have revealed a component of 10-60 GHz emission from the Galaxy which correlates with 100-140um emission from interstellar dust but has an intensity much greater than expected for the low-frequency tail of the "electric dipole vibrational" emission peaking at \~130um. This "anomalous emission" is more than can be accounted for by dust-correlated free-free emission. The anomalous emission could be due in part to magnetic dipole emission from thermal fluctuations of the magnetization within interstellar dust grains, but only if a substantial fraction of the Fe in interstellar dust resides in magnetic materials such as metallic iron or magnetite. The observed anomalous emission is probably due primarily to electric dipole radiation from spinning ultrasmall interstellar dust grains. This rotational emission is expected to be partially polarized. From the standpoint of minimizing confusion with non-CBR foregrounds, 60-120 GHz appears to be the optimal frequency window.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

B. T. Draine, A. Lazarian. 1999-02-25. Microwave Emission from Galactic Dust Grains. https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9902356

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Deformation procedure for scalar fields in cosmology

This work offers an extension of the deformation procedure introduced in field theory to the case of standard cosmology in the presence of real scalar field in flat space-time. The procedure is shown to work for many models, which give rise to several different cosmic scenarios, evolving under the presence of first-order differential equations which solve the corresponding equations of motion very appropriately.

astro-ph

Dark Energy is the Cosmological Quantum Vacuum Energy of Light Particles-The Axion and the Lightest Neutrino

We uncover the general mechanism producing the dark energy(DE). This is only based on well known quantum physics and cosmology. We show that the observed DE originates from the cosmological quantum vacuum of light particles which provides a continuous energy distribution able to reproduce the data. Bosons give positive contributions to the DE while fermions yield negative contributions. As usual in field theory, ultraviolet divergences are subtracted from the physical quantities. The subtractions respect the symmetries of the theory and we normalize the physical quantities to be zero for the Minkowski vacuum. The resulting finite contributions to the energy density and the pressure from the quantum vacuum grow as log a(t) where a(t) is the scale factor, while the particle contributions dilute as 1/a^3(t), as it must be for massive particles. The DE equation of state P = w(z)H turns to be w(z)<-1 with w(z) asymptotically reaching the value -1 from below.A scalar particle can produce the observed DE through its quantum cosmological vacuum provided:(i)its mass is of the order of 10^{-3} eV = 1 meV,(ii) it is very weakly coupled and (iii) it is stable on the time scale of the age of the universe. The axion vacuum thus appears as a natural candidate. The neutrino vacuum (especially the lightest mass eigenstate) can give negative contributions to the DE. We find that w(z=0) is slightly below -1 by an amount ranging from [-1.5 10^{-3}] to [-8 10^{-3}] and we predict the axion mass to be in the range between 4 and 5 meV. We find that the universe will expand in the future faster than the de Sitter universe, as an exponential in the square of the cosmic time. DE arises from the quantum vacua of light particles in FRW cosmological space time in an analogous way to the Casimir effect in Minkowski spacetime with non trivial boundaries.

astro-ph