The interstellar oxygen crisis, or where have all the oxygen atoms gone?
The interstellar oxygen crisis, or where have all the oxygen atoms gone?
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星际氧危机,或者说所有的氧原子都到哪里去了?
DOI:
10.1093/mnras/stv1900
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发表时间:
2015
影响因子:
4.8
通讯作者:
Jiang B. W.
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
Wang Shu;Li Aigen;Jiang B. W.
The interstellar medium (ISM) seems to have a significant surplus of oxygen which was dubbed as the "O crisis": independent of the adopted interstellar reference abundance, the total number of O atoms depleted from the gas phase far exceeds that tied up in solids by as much as ~160ppm of O/H. Recently, it has been hypothesized that the missing O could be hidden in micrometer-sized H2O ice grains. We examine this hypothesis by comparing the infrared (IR) extinction and far-IR emission arising from these grains with that observed in the Galactic diffuse ISM. We find that it is possible for the diffuse ISM to accommodate ~160ppm of O/H in micron-sized H2O ice grains without violating the observational constraints including the absence of the 3.1micron O-H absorption feature. More specifically, H2O ice grains of radii ~4micron and O/H = 160 ppm are capable of accounting for the observed flat extinction at ~ 3-8 micron and produce no excessive emission in the far-IR. These grains could be present in the diffuse ISM through rapid exchange of material between dense molecular clouds where they form and diffuse clouds where they are destroyed by photosputtering.