Skip to main content

The NASA/GSFC network is currently experiencing intermittent issues that affect our services. We are working on it and apologize for the inconvenience.
The offline tool hark (also on github) can be used to find and download data from the cloud.

Xspec Home Page


xscat: dust scattering

This model calculates the X-ray scattering cross section of a population of dust grains as a function of energy, given a specific dust grain position and an extraction region. As the grain position gets closer to the source of the X-rays for a constant extraction region, the cross section drops as more X-rays remain within the extraction circle. For constant dust grain position, the cross section decreases with increasing extraction region size because more photons remain within it.

A detailed description of the model can be found in Smith, Valencic & Corrales (2016).

The model parameters are as follows.

par1 = $NH$ interstellar hydrogen column density ($10^{22}$ cm$^{-2}$).
par2 = $Xpos$ the relative position of the dust along the line of sight. This varies between 0 for dust at the observer and 1 for dust at the source.
par3 = $Rext$ the radius of the circular extraction region (arcsec).
par4 = $DustModel$ the dust model used (see Smith et al. 2016). The model options are 1=MRN, 2=WD, and 3=ZDABAS.

The third and fourth parameters must be frozen.