A New Mechanism for Polarizing Light from Obscured Stars
Astrophysics
2009-11-13 v1
Abstract
Recent spectropolarimetric observations of Herbig AeBe stellar systems show linear polarization variability with wavelength and epoch near their obscured H-alpha emission. Surprisingly, this polarization is not coincident with the H-alpha emission peak but is variable near the absorptive part of the line profile. With a new and novel model we show here that this is evidence of optical pumping - anisotropy of the incident radiation that leads to a linear polarization-dependent optical depth within the intervening hydrogen wind or disk cloud. This effect can yield a larger polarization signal than scattering polarization in these systems.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0708.0599,
title = {A New Mechanism for Polarizing Light from Obscured Stars},
author = {J. R. Kuhn and S. V. Berdyugina and D. M. Fluri and D. M. Harrington and J. O. Stenflo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0708.0599},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
Submitted to ApJ Letters