Influence of the scattering particle shape on the SiO2 silicate feature

Silicate dust particles are part of many astronomical objects such as comets and circumstellar disks. In a spectrum, silicates exhibit a number of characteristic silicate emission features. To study these features, Mie’s theory is usually used. This theory assumes that the scattering object is an ideal sphere. In this work, we investigated the contribution of non-spherical quartz particles (SiO2) to these features. We studied the influence of the deviation from sphericity on the 10-micron silicate feature of quartz. It is shown that the deviation from sphericity has a significant effect on both the scattered light intensity and the scattering factor Qsca, and this effect increases with increasing scattering particle size. The main peculiarities of the 10-micron silicate feature have been studied for both prolate and oblate spheroids.