The Mystery of the Cosmic Diffuse Ultraviolet Background Radiation

TL;DR

This paper investigates the origins of the diffuse cosmic ultraviolet background radiation, finding it cannot be fully explained by dust scattering or dark matter interactions, and explores the role of small interstellar grains and other potential sources.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis ruling out dust scattering and dark matter interactions as primary sources, and suggests the existence of an unknown component contributing to the UV background.

Findings

The UV background is uniform at high Galactic latitudes.

No correlation between small grains and UV emission at high latitudes.

Limited interstellar dust at the Galactic poles supports the findings.

Abstract

The diffuse cosmic background radiation in the GALEX far ultraviolet (FUV, 1300 \AA\ - 1700 \AA) is deduced to originate only partially in the dust-scattered radiation of FUV-emitting stars: the source of a substantial fraction of the FUV background radiation remains a mystery. The radiation is remarkably uniform at both far northern and far southern Galactic latitudes, and it increases toward lower Galactic latitudes at all Galactic longitudes. We examine speculation that it might be due to interaction of the dark matter with the nuclei of the interstellar medium but we are unable to point to a plausible mechanism for an effective interaction. We also explore the possibility that we are seeing radiation from bright FUV-emitting stars scattering from a "second population" of interstellar grains---grains that are small compared with FUV wavelengths. Such grains are known to exist (Draine 2011) and they scatter with very high albedo, with an isotropic scattering pattern. However, comparison with the observed distribution (deduced from their $100\ \mu$m emission) of grains at high Galactic latitudes shows no correlation between the grains' location and the observed FUV emission. Our modeling of the FUV scattering by small grains also shows that there must be remarkably few such "smaller" grains at high Galactic latitudes, both North and South; this likely means simply that there is very little interstellar dust of any kind at the Galactic poles, in agreement with Perry & Johnston (1982). We also review our limited knowledge of the cosmic diffuse background at ultraviolet wavelengths shortward of Lyman $\alpha$---it could be that our "second component" of the diffuse far-ultraviolet background persists shortward of the Lyman limit, and is the cause of the re-ionization of the Universe (Kollmeier et al. 2014).