Interstellar Extinction and Elemental Abundances

TL;DR

This study evaluates different elemental abundance standards to determine which best explains interstellar extinction and dust composition, finding that GCE-augmented protosolar abundances align well with observations.

Contribution

It introduces a model-independent method using the Kramers-Kronig relation to assess the suitability of various abundance standards for interstellar dust modeling.

Findings

B-star, solar, and protosolar abundances are inconsistent with interstellar data.

GCE-augmented protosolar abundances are supported as a realistic standard.

The method provides a lower limit on dust depletion without assuming specific dust models.

Abstract

Elements in the interstellar medium (ISM) exist in the form of gas or dust. The interstellar extinction and elemental abundances provide crucial constraints on the composition, size and quantity of interstellar dust. Most of the extinction modeling efforts have assumed the total abundances (both in gas and in dust) of the dust-forming elements---known as the "interstellar abundances", the "interstellar reference abundances", or the "cosmic abundances"---to be solar and the gas-phase abundances to be independent of the interstellar environments. However, it remains unclear if the solar abundances are an appropriate representation of the interstellar abundances. Meanwhile, the gas-phase abundances are known to exhibit appreciable variations with the local interstellar environments. In this work we explore the viability of the abundances of B stars, the solar and protosolar abundances, and the protosolar abundances augmented by Galactic chemical enrichment (GCE) as an appropriate representation of the interstellar abundances by quantitatively examining the extinction and elemental abundances of ten interstellar lines of sight for which both the extinction curves and the gas-phase abundances of all the major dust-forming elements (i.e., C, O, Mg, Si and Fe) have been observationally determined. Instead of assuming a specific dust model and then fitting the observed extinction curves, for each sightline we apply the model-independent Kramers-Kronig relation, which relates the wavelength-integrated extinction to the total dust volume, to place a lower limit on the dust depletion. This, together with the observationally-derived gas-phase abundances, allows us to rule out the B-star, solar, and protosolar abundances as the interstellar reference standard. We conclude that the GCE-augmented protosolar abundances are a viable representation of the interstellar abundances.