Cool dust and gas in the Small Magellanic Cloud

Details Cool dust and gas in the Small Magellanic Cloud Cool dust and gas in the Small Magellanic Cloud

Jul 2000

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2000mnras.315..791s&link_type=abstract

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 315, Issue 4, pp. 791-807.

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

70

Ism: Clouds, Dust, Extinction, Magellanic Clouds, Infrared: Galaxies

Scientific paper

We present high-angular-resolution, far-infrared images of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The images were reconstructed from data obtained with the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS), using the Pyramid Maximum Entropy algorithm. The angular resolutions of the images are 1arcmin at 12, 25 and 60μm, and 1.7arcmin at 100μm, which provides an excellent complement to the recent neutral hydrogen (Hi) survey from the Australia Telescope Compact Array, which has a resolution of 1.6arcmin. We use the 60- and 100-μm data, together with a standard dust model, to derive a temperature map and a dust column density distribution. Dust temperatures range from 23 to 45K, which is, on average, warmer than for the Galaxy, although there is a deficit of warm, very small dust grains in the SMC. The total amount of cool dust in the SMC is 1.8-0.2+1.3× 104 Msolar. There is a significant variation of the observed dust-to-gas ratio across the SMC. This may be caused by corresponding variations in metallicity, but this explanation is not supported by the limited available data in the literature. Alternatively, there may be a large amount of molecular hydrogen (H2) in the SMC, ~8×108Msolar, and/or a large amount (~106Msolar) of cold dust (<=15K) not seen by IRAS or COBE/DIRBE. The average dust-to-atomic gas ratio is, by mass, 8.2×10-5, which is a factor of ~30 below the Galactic value. The spatial power spectrum of the dust column density image can be approximated by Pd(k)~k-3.1, which shows that, as with the Hi power spectrum, there is no preferred scale size for dust clouds. A spatial coherence analysis shows that, over a wide range of spatial scales (>~50pc), Hi and dust are well correlated (>60per cent).

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