The Herschel and JCMT Gould Belt Surveys: Constraining Dust Properties in the Perseus B1 Clump with PACS, SPIRE, and SCUBA-2

TL;DR

This study combines Herschel and JCMT observations to accurately determine dust properties in the Perseus B1 clump, revealing variations in dust emissivity and improving core mass estimates through multi-wavelength data integration.

Contribution

It introduces a robust method for combining Herschel and SCUBA-2 data to constrain dust emissivity index and temperature, enhancing the accuracy of core mass measurements.

Findings

Beta ~ 2 in filament regions and lower in dense cores

Including SCUBA-2 data improves beta and temperature estimates

Core mass differences are less than 30% with combined data

Abstract

We present Herschel observations from the Herschel Gould Belt Survey and SCUBA-2 science verification observations from the JCMT Gould Belt Survey of the B1 clump in the Perseus molecular cloud. We determined the dust emissivity index using four different techniques to combine the Herschel PACS+SPIRE data at 160 - 500 microns with the SCUBA-2 data at 450 microns and 850 microns. Of our four techniques, we found the most robust method was to filter-out the large-scale emission in the Herschel bands to match the spatial scales recovered by the SCUBA-2 reduction pipeline. Using this method, we find beta ~ 2 towards the filament region and moderately dense material and lower beta values (beta > 1.6) towards the dense protostellar cores, possibly due to dust grain growth. We find that beta and temperature are more robust with the inclusion of the SCUBA-2 data, improving estimates from Herschel data alone by factors of ~ 2 for beta and by ~ 40% for temperature. Furthermore, we find core mass differences of < 30% compared to Herschel-only estimates with an adopted beta = 2, highlighting the necessity of long wavelength submillimeter data for deriving accurate masses of prestellar and protostellar cores.