7.2. Internal and External Dust
The dust in external galaxies may not have exactly the same extinction
properties as in our interstellar medium. In particular, some of the
broad extinction
features, such as the one centered at 2200Å, may be weak or absent
in other
galaxies. The amount of extinction will be estimated assuming a galactic
dust-to-gas ratio and a simple,
-1
extinction law. Thus, for a dust on the line of
sight to the source, the extinction in magnitude, for a gas column
density Ncol, is
| (68) |
Dust can also be mixed in with the gas, absorbing both the external
incident
radiation and the internally produced line photons. The first and large
effect on the emergent spectrum is the extinction of the ionizing
radiation in a
wavelength dependent way. This can be incorporated into the photoionization
calculations provided the extinction properties of the dust at
912Å are known.
Internal dust can also destroy line photons with an efficiency that depends
on the wavelength and the optical depth of the line in question. For
forbidden
lines, intercombination lines, and all other lines of negligible optical
depth, the absorption probability is simply [1 -
exp(-
dust)] and
depends only on the line
frequency. This is not the case for resonance lines and other lines of
considerable
optical depth, where the lengthening of the path before escape is
considerable (about a factor of 5, see
section 4.4.2) due to the large
number of scatterings.
Such line photons are easily destroyed by dust and the result is a
considerable
weakening of the large optical depth lines compared with all other
lines. AGN observations do not show any large reduction in the strength of
L
,
CIV1549,
and other optically thick lines, compared with the calculated intensity
of the intercombination lines like
CIII]1909. Therefore, the amount of internal dust,
at least in the BLR clouds, cannot be large.
It is easy to incorporate these effects into the calculations using the formalism described in chapter 4 (equations 42-46). The main complication is the unknown dust distribution, which may not be uniform. In particular, the neutral gas zone is a more likely location for the dust particle to survive the intense radiation of the central source. Finally, internal dust can also change the hydrogen line spectrum in a low density gas, by providing a de-excitation mechanism for some high energy levels, decreasing, in this way, the effective optical depth of the Lyman lines.