2019/03/08 by Cyrine Nehmé, Nehmé, Cyrine, Sarkis Kassounian +4
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) #FOS: Physical sciences #Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM) #Space Physics (physics.space-ph) #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph.GA #astro-ph.IM #physics.space-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1903.03389
arxiv created 2019/03/08 · openalex publication_date 2019/03/08 · arxiv updated 2019/03/11 · openalex created_date 2019/03/22 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Ample evidence exists regarding supernovae being a major contributor to interstellar dust. In this work, the deepest far-infrared observations of the Crab Nebula are used to revisit the estimation of the dust mass present in this supernova remnant. Images in filters between 70 and 500 μm taken by the PACS and SPIRE instruments on-board of the Herschel Space Observatory are used. With an automated approach we constructed the spectral energy distribution of the Crab nebula to recover the dust mass. This approach makes use of several image processing techniques (thresholding, morphological processes, contouring, etc..) to objectively separate the nebula from its surrounding background. After subtracting the non-thermal synchrotron component from the integrated fluxes, the spectral energy distribution is found to be best fitted using a single modified blackbody of temperature T=42.06±1.14 K and a dust mass of Md=0.056±0.037 M\odot. In this paper, we show the importance of the photometric analysis and spectral energy distribution construction in the inference of the dust mass of the Crab nebula.