The role of dust in the pumping of cosmic masers

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

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Cosmic Dust, Interstellar Masers, Optical Pumping, Water Masers, Infrared Absorption, Molecular Rotation, Population Inversion, Thermodynamics, Vibrational Spectra

Scientific paper

The possible effect of continuous-spectrum dust particle absorption and emission on the population distribution of the energy levels of interstellar molecules is discussed. It is shown that the effect of dust particles on linear radiative transfer is strongly dependent on the wave number of the transition, which means that the presence of dust may substantially alter the character of the population distribution in a multilevel system. If the dust temperature differs from the kinetic temperature, the dust may participate in the population inversion pumping of cosmic masers, such that the dust could be the principal source or the principal sink of molecular excitation energy. It is suggested that the concept of cold dust being a sink for IR photons resolves a thermodynamic difficulty discussed by Goldreich and Kwan (1974) concerning cosmic H2O masers. The possibility that the presence of the dust might explain the anticorrelation, observed in several IR stars, of the light curves for IR and maser H2O emission is considered.

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