Astrophysics and Space Science

, Volume 344, Issue 1, pp 193–203 | Cite as

Temperature of interstellar warm ionized medium

  • Sanjay K. Mishra
  • Mahendra Singh Sodha
  • Sweta Srivastava
Original Article
First Online:
Received:
Accepted:

Abstract

This investigation on the temperature of the interstellar warm ionized medium (WIM) is characterized by the number and energy balance of the constituents of the WIM complex plasma viz. H plasma (electrons/ions/neutral atoms) and graphite dust, having a size distribution, characterized by the MRN (Mathis, Rumpl and Nordsieck) power law. Ionization of neutral atoms, electron–ion recombination, photoemission of electrons from and accretion on the dust and cooling through electron collisional excitation, followed by radiative decay of atoms has been included in the analysis. An appropriate expression for the rate of emission and mean energy of photoelectrons emitted from the surface of positively charged dust particles has been used which takes into account the dependence of absorption efficiency on wavelength of the radiation, radius of the particle and spectral irradiance distribution. The results of the parametric analysis have been displayed graphically. It is seen that the consensus values of temperature, surface potential on the dust particles and electron/ion/neutral atom densities, characteristic of interstellar warm ionized medium can be explained on the basis of plausible combinations of the dust particle density n d and the parameter f ex α ex , where f ex is the fraction of the energy of the neutral gas atoms which gets irradiated, α ex n e n n is the number of the neutral atoms, which get excited per unit volume per unit time and n e (n n ) correspond to the density of electrons (neutral atoms).

Keywords

Interstellar medium Photo emission Size distribution Uniform potential theory 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India for support of this work and to Prof. M.P. Verma for valuable suggestions. The authors appreciate the introduction to this exciting area by Dr. S.K. Agarwal, Ansal Institute of Technology, Lucknow.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012

Authors and Affiliations

  • Sanjay K. Mishra
    • 1
  • Mahendra Singh Sodha
    • 2
  • Sweta Srivastava
    • 2
  1. 1.Institute for Plasma ResearchGandhi NagarIndia
  2. 2.Department of Education BuildingLucknow UniversityLucknowIndia

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