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Polarized Infrared Emission from Dust
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 September 2016
Extract
At the beginning of this decade what we knew about polarization of far-infrared emission from dense clouds was that some very good observers had looked for it and had not found it. Gull et al. (1978) had shown that the degree of polarization in Orion was not more than 2%. That information provided an important guide but very little encouragement for later efforts. There was reason to doubt whether the mechanisms invoked to explain the alignment of dust grains in the diffuse intercloud medium would operate in dense clouds; whether the strengths of the magnetic fields in dense clouds would be sufficiently greater than those in the intercloud medium to overcome the higher rate at which gas collisions would destroy alignment; and whether the field, if sufficient locally, would have enough large-scale order to give measurable polarization in far-infrared observations with large beams and large column depths.
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- Section III: Dust in Dense Clouds
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- Copyright © Kluwer 1989
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