Home > Seminars > Année 2012 > Séminaire Giacomo MULAS (2 mai 2012)
Séminaire Giacomo MULAS (2 mai 2012)
INAF-Osservatorio Astronomico di Cagliari, Italy
Contribution of PAHs to the interstellar extinction curve: a review
Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs), in the rather broad meaning that astronomers give to this chemical family, are now considered an established component of the interstellar medium. In particular, they are an important ingredient of interstellar extinction models. This contribution, while early recognised to be important, took some time to be adequately estimated and modelled, due to the difficulty in obtaining applicable estimates of PAH absorption cross sections in the UV, particularly in the higher energy range.
Things have steadily improved over time, both from the experimental and theoretical point of view, so that now it is becoming possible to attempt to match the UV extinction curve with mixtures of computed PAH cross sections. In this talk, I will give a review of the contribution of PAHs to the UV extinction curve and how it evolved over the years.
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