Chastenet, Jérémy;
De Looze, Ilse;
Hensley, Brandon S;
Vandenbroucke, Bert;
Barlow, Mike J;
Rho, Jeonghee;
Ravi, Aravind P;
... Wesson, Roger; + view all
(2022)
SOFIA/HAWC+ observations of the Crab Nebula: dust properties from polarised emission.
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
, 516
(3)
, Article stac2413. 10.1093/mnras/stac2413.
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Abstract
Supernova remnants (SNRs) are well-recognised dust producers, but their net dust production rate remains elusive due to uncertainties in grain properties that propagate into observed dust mass uncertainties, and determine how efficiently these grains are processed by reverse shocks. In this paper, we present a detection of polarised dust emission in the Crab pulsar wind nebula, the second SNR with confirmed polarised dust emission after Cassiopeia A. We constrain the bulk composition of the dust with new SOFIA/HAWC+ polarimetric data in band C 89 μm and band D 154 μm. After correcting for synchrotron polarisation, we report dust polarisation fractions ranging between 3.7 − 9.6 per cent and 2.7 − 7.6 per cent in three individual dusty filaments at 89 and 154 μm, respectively. The detected polarised signal suggests the presence of large (≳ 0.05 − 0.1 μm) grains in the Crab Nebula. With the observed polarisation, and polarised and total fluxes, we constrain the temperatures and masses of carbonaceous and silicate grains. We find that the carbon-rich grain mass fraction varies between 12 and 70 per cent, demonstrating that carbonaceous and silicate grains co-exist in this SNR. Temperatures range from ∼40 K to ∼70 K and from ∼30 K to ∼50 K for carbonaceous and silicate grains, respectively. Dust masses range from ∼10−4 M⊙ to ∼10−2 M⊙ for carbonaceous grains and to ∼10−1 M⊙ for silicate grains, in three individual regions.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | SOFIA/HAWC+ observations of the Crab Nebula: dust properties from polarised emission |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1093/mnras/stac2413 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stac2413 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Royal Astronomical Society. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| Keywords: | ISM: supernova remnants, (stars:) supernovae: individual: Crab, (ISM:) dust, extinction, polarization |
| UCL classification: | UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Physics and Astronomy UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10154784 |
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