Porous and Fluffy Grains in the Regions of Anomalous Extinction

Abstract

It has long been established that the ratio of total to selective extinction is anomalously large (³ 5) in certain regions of the interstellar medium. In these regions of anomalous extinction the dust grains are likely to be irregular in shape and fluffy in structure. Using discrete dipole approximation (DDA) we calculate the extinction for porous and fluffy grains. We apply DDA first to solid spheroidal particles assumed to be made of a certain (large) number of dipoles. Then we systematically reduce the number of dipoles to model the porous grains. The aggregates of these particles are suggested to form the fluffy grains. We study the extinction for these particles as a function of grain size, porosity and wavelength. We apply these calculations to interpret the observed extinc tion data in the regions of star formation (e.g. the Orion complex).