No cold dust within the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A
- 1 December 2004
- journal article
- letter
- Published by Springer Science and Business Media LLC in Nature
- Vol. 432 (7017), 596-598
- https://doi.org/10.1038/nature03110
Abstract
A large amount (about three solar masses) of cold (18 K) dust in the prototypical type II supernova remnant Cassiopeia A was recently reported1. It was concluded that dust production in type II supernovae can explain how the large quantities (∼ 108 solar masses) of dust observed2 in the most distant quasars could have been produced within only 700 million years after the Big Bang. Foreground clouds of interstellar material, however, complicate the interpretation of the earlier submillimetre observations of Cas A. Here we report far-infrared and molecular line observations that demonstrate that most of the detected submillimetre emission originates from interstellar dust in a molecular cloud complex located in the line of sight between the Earth and Cas A, and is therefore not associated with the remnant. The argument that type II supernovae produce copious amounts of dust is not supported by the case of Cas A, which previously appeared to provide the best evidence for this possibility.Keywords
This publication has 15 references indexed in Scilit:
- Imaging of the Supernova Remnant Cassiopeia A with the Multiband Imaging Photometer for Spitzer (MIPS)The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, 2004
- The Multiband Imaging Photometer for Spitzer (MIPS)The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, 2004
- The Detection of Cold Dust in Cassiopeia A: Evidence for the Formation of Metallic Needles in the EjectaThe Astrophysical Journal, 2004
- Dust emission from the most distant quasarsAstronomy & Astrophysics, 2003
- Type II supernovae as a significant source of interstellar dustNature, 2003
- Very Large Array Observations of 6 Centimeter H2CO in the Direction of Cassiopeia AThe Astrophysical Journal, 2002
- SCUBA: a common-user submillimetre camera operating on the James Clerk Maxwell TelescopeMonthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1999
- VLA observations of 1667 MHz OH absorption toward Cassiopeia AThe Astrophysical Journal, 1986
- Did Flamsteed see the Cassiopeia A supernova?Nature, 1980
- Nonthermal OH main lines and the abundance of OH in interstellar dust cloudsThe Astrophysical Journal, 1979