Related papers: Stardust findings. Implications for panspermia
We investigate the sources and amount of dust in early galaxies. We discuss dust nucleation in stellar atmospheres using published extended atmosphere models, stellar evolution tracks and nucleation conditions and conclude that the (TPAGB)…
In situ research on cometary chemistry began when measurements from the Giotto mission at comet 1P/Halley revealed the presence of complex organics in the coma. New telescopes and space missions have provided detailed remote and in situ…
Resolving the environments of massive stars is crucial for understanding their formation mechanisms and their impact on galaxy evolution. An important open question is whether massive stars found in diffuse regions outside spiral arms…
As comets journey into the inner solar system, they deliver particulates and volatile gases into their comae that reveal the most primitive materials in the solar system. Cometary dust particles provide crucial information for assessing the…
We study the process of panspermia in Milky Way-like galaxies by modeling the probability of successful travel of organic compounds between stars harboring potentially habitable planets. To this end, we apply the modified habitability…
Observations of dusty debris disks can be used to test theories of planetesimal coagulation. Planetesimals of sizes up to a couple thousand kms are embedded in these disks and their mutual collisions generate the small dust grains that are…
A large amount (about three solar masses) of cold (18 K) dust in the prototypical type II supernova remnant Cassiopeia A was recently reported. It was concluded that dust production in type II supernovae can explain how the large quantities…
Super Star Clusters are one of the most extreme star forming environments in the universe, and the most massive and dense of these may be proto globular clusters. Like individual massive stars, the earliest stages of super star cluster…
The solar system was most likely born in a star cluster containing at least 1000 stars. It is highly probable that this cluster environment influenced various properties of the solar system like its chemical composition, size and the…
In the past decade, our understanding of galaxy evolution has been revolutionized by the discovery that luminous, dusty, starburst galaxies were 1,000 times more abundant in the early Universe than at present. It has, however, been…
While it is widely accepted that planets are formed in protoplanetary disks, there is still much debate on when this process happens. In a few cases protoplanets have been directly imaged, but for the vast majority of systems, disk gaps and…
Hydrogravitional-dynamics (HGD) cosmology of Gibson/Schild 1996 predicts that the primordial H-He^4 gas of big bang nucleosynthesis became proto-globular-star-cluster clumps of Earth-mass planets at 300 Kyr. The first stars formed from…
Observational data on the dust content of circumstellar disks show that the median dust content in disks around pre-main sequence stars in nearby star forming regions seem to increase from about 1 Myr to about 2 Myr, and then decline with…
Although dust emission at cosmological distances has only been detected a little more than a decade ago, remarkable progress has been achieved since then in characterizing the far-infrared emission of high-redshift systems. The mere fact…
Interstellar dust plays a crucial role in the evolution of the Universe by assisting the formation of molecules, by triggering the formation of the first low-mass stars, and by absorbing stellar ultraviolet-optical light and subsequently…
Since the 1990's, protoplanetary disks and planetary disks have been intensively observed from the optical to the millimetre wavelength and many models have been developed to investigate their gas and dust properties and dynamics. These…
Two distinct scenarios for the origin of the ~ 4 \times 10^8 M\odot of dust observed in the high-redshift (z = 6.4) quasar J1148+5251 have been proposed. The first assumes that this galaxy is much younger than the age of the universe at…
Our Solar System originated in interstellar gas and dust; the latter is in the form of amorphous silicate particles and carbonaceous dust. The composition of cometary material shows that a significant fraction of the amorphous silicates was…
The formation of planetesimals in the early Solar System is hardly understood, and in particular the growth of dust aggregates above millimeter sizes has recently turned out to be a difficult task in our understanding [Zsom et al. 2010,…
In addition to planets and other small bodies, stellar systems will likely also host exozodiacal dust, or exozodi. This warm dust primarily resides in or near the habitable zone of a star, and scatters stellar light in visible to NIR…