Browsing by Author "Scowen, Paul Andrew"

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    A calculation of the mean age of interstellar dust particles
    (1989) Scowen, Paul Andrew; Clayton, Donald D.
    This thesis aims to compute the mean age of interstellar dust particles using a sputtering and recycling model originally formulated by Liffman and Clayton. The ages of the particles are evaluated after a period of 6 $\times$ 10$\sp9$ years, deemed here to be the age of our Galaxy, when the Solar System formed. I find a correlation between resulting particle sizes and their mean age. The consequence of this correlation is that if interstellar particles can be sorted dynamically by size, then the conglomerations of these size populations as dust grains will be composed of matter that is of differing ages. This age variation in grains of differing sizes will produce isotopic variations, or anomalies, due to the time dependent nature of secondary versus primary nucleosynthesis. The most important example of such an observed anomaly is the 5% enrichment of $\sp{16}$O in inclusions of Al$\sb2$O$\sb3$ in meteorite structures relative to the abundance of $\sp{16}$O in the solar gas. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)
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    A study of the H II region populations of M101, M51 and NGC 4449
    (1992) Scowen, Paul Andrew; Dufour, Reginald J.
    An optical study of the HII region populations evident in three galaxies, M101, M51 and NGC 4449, has been made. Using narrow-band filters, emission line imagery has been taken using a CCD focal-reducing camera, at wavelengths covering the emission from H $\alpha,$ H $\beta,$ (O III) $\lambda$5007 and (S II) $\lambda\lambda$6716+6731. Using several identification techniques to spatially select the HII regions, emission line properties have been derived for 625 HII regions in M101, 465 in M51 and 163 in NGC 4449, making this the most complete study of its kind to date. Several trends have been discovered concerning the properties of the HII regions with radial position within their galaxy. M101 exhibits a large gradient in excitation, and oxygen abundance, as well as a gradient in the line-of-sight reddening. No positional variation in the derived ionization parameter for each HII region was found. Local variations in the effective collapse density for neutral gas have been detected for both M101 and M51. No such analysis was possible for NGC 4449 due to a lack of available data. M51 shows systematic emission variations only in the brightest cores of its largest HII regions, an effect attributed to a larger influence of the local ISM on the properties of the fainter, and more obscured, HII regions. M51 exhibits a spiral pattern that does not follow a single mathematical description, departing most dramatically at the corotation radius. A variation in the evolutionary time from peak local compression to peak star formation with radius has been detected for one of the arms in the galaxy, but not the other. NGC 4449 displays no systematic variations in the derived emission properties of its HII region population. This is attributed to a star formation mechanism that is independent of the radial ordinate, contrasting with the spiral density wave mechanism dominant in spiral galaxies. Unprecedented deep CCD imagery of this galaxy is presented, revealing the complicated structure of ionized filaments between the HII regions. The emission properties of these filaments are studied.