2003/10/29 by V. Tatischeff, J. Kiener · 20 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy #Astrophysics #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #COSMIC cancer database #Cosmic dust #Cosmic ray #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Dust lane #Galaxy #Interstellar medium #Line (geometry) #Physics #Star formation #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.newar.2003.11.013
published in New Astronomy Reviews 48(1-4), 99-103 (Elsevier BV) · 7 pages, 4 figures, to be published in New Astronomy Reviews (proceedings of the Workshop "Astronomy with Radioactivities IV and Filling the Sensitivity Gap in MeV Astronomy", Seeon, Germany, May 26-30, 2003)
arxiv created 2003/10/29 · openalex publication_date 2003/12/22 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
As pointed out by Lingenfelter and Ramaty (1977), the shapes of some gamma-ray lines produced by cosmic-ray interactions with the interstellar medium potentially contain valuable information on the physical properties of dust grains, including their compositions and size distributions. The most promising of such lines are at 847, 1369, 1779 and 6129 keV, from 56-Fe*, 24-Mg*, 28-Si* and 16-O*, respectively. We performed detailed calculations of their profiles using, in particular, available laboratory measurements combined with optical model calculations to evaluate the energy distributions of the recoiling excited nuclei. We show that the line shapes are mainly sensitive to relatively large interstellar grains, with radii greater than 0.25 microns. Line fluxes from the inner Galaxy are then predicted.