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Photoelectric Emission from Interstellar Dust: Grain Charging and Gas Heating

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arxiv astro-ph/9907251 v4 pith:4HIPRYLA submitted 1999-07-19 astro-ph

Photoelectric Emission from Interstellar Dust: Grain Charging and Gas Heating

classification astro-ph
keywords heatingphotoelectricinterstellardustfindgrainmediumregions
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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We model the photoelectric emission from and charging of interstellar dust and obtain photoelectric gas heating efficiencies as a function of grain size and the relevant ambient conditions. Using realistic grain size distributions, we evaluate the net gas heating rate for various interstellar environments, and find less heating for dense regions characterized by R_V=5.5 than for diffuse regions with R_V=3.1. We provide fitting functions which reproduce our numerical results for photoelectric heating and recombination cooling for a wide range of interstellar conditions. In a separate paper we will examine the implications of these results for the thermal structure of the interstellar medium. Finally, we investigate the potential importance of photoelectric heating in H II regions, including the warm ionized medium. We find that photoelectric heating could be comparable to or exceed heating due to photoionization of H for high ratios of the radiation intensity to the gas density. We also find that photoelectric heating by dust can account for the observed variation of temperature with distance from the galactic midplane in the warm ionized medium.

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Cited by 4 Pith papers

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