Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
May 2007
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007aas...210.7904h&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society Meeting 210, #79.04; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.187
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
Scientific paper
Aligned grains provide a unique way to trace magnetic field topology in many astrophysical environments. In Lazarian & Hoang (2006), we derived analytical expressions for radiative torque (RAT) components, and studied the dynamics of grains assuming that the maximal inertia axis is always parallel to angular momentum. In this paper, to get insight into the dynamics of grains when thermal fluctuations are accounted for, we use AMO, and perform analytically averaging for RAT components. In addition, we study the RAT alignment for irregular grains (shape 1 and 3). We also evaluate the influence of suprathermal torques arising from H2 formation, as well as randomizing collisions with atomic gas on the alignment of grains driven by radiative torques (RATs). Our study is both based on the analytical model (AMO) and numerical calculations of RATs for irregular grains. To describe the H2 formation torques and random collisions we use the Langevin equation approach. We show that when thermal fluctuations are included, for both AMO and irregular grains, RATs tend to align grains at attractor points with low angular momentum (low-J attractor point). We found that random collisions by atomic gas act to substantially disalign the grain alignment in the case the phase trajectory map has only the low-J attractor point. In particular, if there exist attractor points at high angular momentum in the phase trajectory map, gas bombardment can move grains from the low- J attractor point to the high-J attractor point. Thus the degree of alignment increases.
Hoang Thiem
Lazarian Alex
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