Sequence structure emission in The Red Rectangle Bands
Abstract
We report high resolution (R~37,000) integral field spectroscopy of the central region (r<14arcsec) of the Red Rectangle nebula surrounding HD44179. The observations focus on the 5800A emission feature, the bluest of the yellow/red emission bands in the Red Rectangle. We propose that the emission feature, widely believed to be a molecular emission band, is not a molecular rotation contour, but a vibrational contour caused by overlapping sequence bands from a molecule with an extended chromophore. We model the feature as arising in a Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon (PAH) with 45-100 carbon atoms.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0510790,
title = {Sequence structure emission in The Red Rectangle Bands},
author = {R. G. Sharp and N. J. Reilly and S. H. Kable and T. W. Schmidt},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0510790},
year = {2010}
}
Comments
13 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ. A version of the paper with full resolution figures is available at: http://www.aao.gov.au/local/www/rgs/Sequence-Structure/