AKARI far-infrared maps of the zodiacal dust bands

TL;DR

This study utilizes AKARI far-infrared all-sky maps to analyze small-scale zodiacal dust structures, improving models of interplanetary dust emission and aiding in sky brightness calibration near the ecliptic plane.

Contribution

It constructs detailed templates of zodiacal dust bands from AKARI data, revealing structures at specific wavelengths and improving the accuracy of zodiacal emission models.

Findings

Detected small-scale dust-band structures at 65 and 90 μm.

Constructed templates for asteroidal dust bands and circumsolar ring.

Achieved flux calibration comparable to high ecliptic latitudes after dust subtraction.

Abstract

Zodiacal emission is thermal emission from interplanetary dust. Its contribution to the sky brightness is non-negligible in the region near the ecliptic plane, even in the far-infrared (far-IR) wavelength regime. We analyse zodiacal emission observed by the AKARI far-IR all-sky survey, which covers 97% of the entire sky at arcminute-scale resolution in four photometric bands, with central wavelengths of 65, 90, 140, and 160 $\mu$m. AKARI detected small-scale structures in the zodiacal dust cloud, including the asteroidal dust bands and the circumsolar ring, at far-IR wavelengths. Although the smooth component of the zodiacal emission structure in the far-IR sky can be reproduced well by models based on existing far-IR observations, previous zodiacal emission models have discrepancies in the small-scale structures compared with observations. We investigate the geometry of the small-scale dust-band structures in the AKARI far-IR all-sky maps and construct template maps of the asteroidal dust bands and the circumsolar ring components based on the AKARI far-IR maps. In the maps, $\pm 1.4\deg$, $\pm 2.1\deg$ and $\pm 10\deg$ asteroidal dust-band structures are detected in the 65 $\mu$m and 90 $\mu$m bands. A possible $\pm 17\deg$ band may also have been detected. No evident dust-band structures are identified in either the 140 $\mu$m or the 160 $\mu$m bands. By subtracting the dust-band templates constructed in this paper, we can achieve a similar level of flux calibration of the AKARI far-IR all-sky maps in the $|\beta| < 40\deg$ region to that in the region for $|\beta| > 40\deg$.