Neutrino decay and the heat budget of the warm interstellar medium

Details Neutrino decay and the heat budget of the warm interstellar medium Neutrino decay and the heat budget of the warm interstellar medium

May 1993

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1993apj...409l..25s&link_type=abstract

Astrophysical Journal, Part 2 - Letters (ISSN 0004-637X), vol. 409, no. 1, p. L25-L28.

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

21

Dark Matter, Decay, Heat Budget, Interstellar Matter, Neutrinos, Electron Density (Concentration), Hydrocarbons, Ionization, Photoelectric Emission

Scientific paper

Although neutrino decay photons may be the primary source of the widespread ionization of the warm interstellar medium, and of its cooling due to the collisional excitation of C II, they are too soft to be its main heating agent. The possibility that photoelectric emission by polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), induced by stellar UV photons, is the main heating agent of the interstellar medium is considered. Recent observations of the UV spectrum of a halo star are used to show that the cooling rate per H nucleon in each of their 4 slowly moving warm absorption components has the same value to within 10 pct. If 21 pct of the C in each component were locked up in PAHs, the PAH heating mechanism would be adequate to compensate for this cooling. The constancy of the electron density, along with the finding by Spitzer and Fitzpatrick that along their line of sight most of the free electrons and photons are probably completely mixed up with the H I in warm regions opaque to Lyman-continuum photons, strongly supports the neutrino decay theory.

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