2016/07/31 by S. Srinivasan, Srinivasan, Sundar, Kemper, Franciska +2
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomical Observations and Instrumentation #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) #FOS: Physical sciences #Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR) #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1608.00312
openalex publication_date 2016/07/31 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars are significant contributors to the\nchemical enrichment of the interstellar medium (ISM) of galaxies. It is\ntherefore essential to constrain the AGB contribution to the dust budget in\ngalaxies. Recent estimates of the total dust injection rate to the Large and\nSmall Magellanic Clouds (LMC and SMC; Riebel et al. 2012, Boyer et al. 2012,\nSrinivasan et al. in prep) have used data from the Spitzer Space Telescope SAGE\n(Surveying the Agents of Galaxy Evolution; Meixner et al. 2006) and SAGE-SMC\n(Gordon et al. 2011) surveys. When sorted by dust chemistry, the data allow for\na comparison of O-rich and carbonaceous dust-production rates. In the LMC, for\ninstance, the rate of dust production from carbon stars is about two and a half\ntimes that from oxygen-rich AGBs. A reliable determination of the fractional\ncontributions of the two types of dust would serve as input to models of\nchemical evolution. However, the Spitzer IRAC photometric bands do not\nsufficiently probe the characteristic mid-infrared spectral features that can\ndistinguish O-rich AGBs from carbon stars - namely, the 9.7 \μm silicate\nfeature and the 11.3 \μm silicon carbide feature. With the continuous\nspectral coverage in the 4-30 \μm range, SPICA has the potential to\ndistinguish these two types of chemistries. In this contribution, synthetic\nphotometry from the model grid of AGB stars, GRAMS (Sargent et al. 2011;\nSrinivasan et al. 2011) will be used to discuss the science possibilities that\nSPICA might offer this study.\n