SOFIA/HAWC+ Observations of the Crab Nebula: Dust Properties From Far-IR Polarised Emission
Event date
-
Speaker
Jeremy Chastenet
Affiliation
Ghent University
Location
Online
Event Type
Teletalk

For information on how to participate in the Tele-Talks, please check the SOFIA Tele-Talk page.

We present a detection of polarised dust emission in the Crab pulsar wind nebula. 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% and 2.7-7.6% 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%, demonstrating that carbonaceous and silicate grains co-exist in this SNR. Temperatures range from ~ 40 to ~ 70 K and ~ 30 to ~ 50 K for carbonaceous and silicate grains, respectively. Dust masses range from ~ 0.0001 to ~ 0.01 Solar masses for carbonaceous grains and to 0.1 Solar masses for silicate grains, in three individual regions.

Speaker Materials
Audio file
Document