Near-infrared Polarization Charateristics of the Zodiacal Light Observed with DIRBE/COBE

Abstract

We report near-infrared polarization of the zodiacal light (ZL) measured from space by the Diffuse Infrared Background Experiment (DIRBE) on board the Cosmic Background Explorer in photometric bands centered at 1.25, 2.2, and 3.5 $\mu$m. To constrain the physical properties of interplanetary dust (IPD), we use DIRBE Weekly Sky Maps to investigate the solar elongation ($\epsilon$), ecliptic latitude ($\beta$), and wavelength ($\lambda$) dependence of ZL polarization. We find that the polarization of the ZL varies as a function of $\epsilon$ and $\beta$, consistent with observed polarization at $\lambda$ = 550 nm. While the polarization dependence with wavelength at $(\epsilon$, $\beta )=(90^{\circ }$, $0^{\circ })$ is modest (increasing from 17.7 $\pm$ 0.2% at 1.25 $\mu$m to 21.0 $\pm$ 0.3% at 3.5 $\mu$m), the variation is more pronounced at the North Ecliptic Pole (23.1 $\pm$ 1.6, 35.1 $\pm$ 2.0 and 39.3 $\pm$ 2.1% at 1.25, 2.2 and 3.5 $\mu$m, respectively). The variation of ZL polarization with wavelength is not explained by either Rayleigh scattering or by absorptive particles larger than 10 $\mu$m.

11 pages, 12 figures, accepted by ApJ

References in corpus (5)

• Measurements of the mean diffuse galactic light spectrum in the 0.95 μm to 1.65 μm band from CIBER
• Zodiacal light observations and its link with cosmic dust: a review
• Comet 162P/Siding Spring: A Surprisingly Large Nucleus
• The isotropic interplanetary dust cloud and near-infrared extragalactic background light observed with COBE/DIRBE
• Polarization spectrum of near infrared zodiacal light observed with CIBER

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Heliocentric Distance Dependence of Zodiacal Light Observed by Hayabusa2#
• SKYSURF-11: A New Zodiacal Light Model Optimized for Optical Wavelengths