Related papers: Interstellar Grains: 50 Years On
In this paper I review a series of observations which do not agree with the standard interpretation of the extinction curve. The consequence is that light we receive from a reddened star must be contaminated by starlight scattered at very…
Grain alignment theory suggests that grains should be aligned in circumstellar regions and the observational data available supports this conclusion. We discuss the alignment of grains via (1) magnetic relaxation, (2) mechanical processes,…
A granular instability driven by gravity is studied experimentally and numerically. The instability arises as grains fall in a closed Hele-Shaw cell where a layer of dense granular material is positioned above a layer of air. The initially…
We are living in a dusty universe: dust is ubiquitously seen in a wide variety of astrophysical environments, ranging from circumstellar envelopes around cool red giants to supernova ejecta, from diffuse and dense interstellar clouds and…
The review contains an analysis of the observed and model curves of the interstellar extinction and polarization. The observations mainly give information on dust in diffuse and translucent interstellar clouds. The features of various dust…
The wavelength dependences of interstellar extinction and polarization, supplemented by observed elemental abundances and the spectrum of infrared emission from dust heated by starlight, strongly constrain dust models. One dust model that…
This review summarizes the observational characteristics of those interstellar grains which are prevented from entering the solar system by interactions with the heliopause. Such grains are typically less tha 100nm in radius, and they…
While the problem of grain alignment was posed more than 60 years ago the quantitative model of grain alignment that can account for the observed polarization arising from aligned grains has been formulated only recently. The quantitative…
According to a new tired-light cosmological model, where H(z) = H 0 (1 + z), the number density of galaxies has been nearly constant over the last 10 Gyr, at least, meaning that, as far as galaxy counts are concerned, the Universe has been…
The origin of grain size distribution in the interstellar medium is one of the most fundamental problems in the interstellar physics. In the Milky Way, smaller grains are more abundant in number, but their origins are not necessarily…
Interstellar grains may be composite collections of particles of distinct materials, including voids, agglomerated together. We determine the various optical cross sections of such composite grains, given the optical properties of each…
The matter content of the Universe is generally regarded as a perfect fluid on sufficiently large scales, for all epochs. But the recent cosmological matter distribution, consisting of an (ideally) random distribution of gravitationally…
Paramagnetic alignment of suprathermally rotating grains is discussed in view of recent progress in understanding subtle processes taking place over grain surface. It is shown that in typical ISM conditions, grains with surfaces of…
We investigate the composition of interstellar grains along the line of sight toward Zeta Ophiuchi, a well-studied environment near the diffuse-dense cloud transition. A spectral decomposition analysis of the solid-state absorbers is…
Inflationary cosmology has, in the last few years,received a strong dose of support from observations. The fact that the fluctuation spectrum can be extracted from the inflationary scenario through an analysis that involves quantum field…
For many decades the determination of accurate fundamental parameters for stars (masses, radii, temperatures, luminosities, etc.) has mostly been the domain of eclipsing binary systems. That has begun to change as long-baseline…
Aligned grains present a foreground for cosmic microwave emission studies. We review basic physical processes involved in grain alignment and discuss the niches for different alignment mechanisms. We show that mechanisms which were favored…
The evolution of irregular galaxies is examined from two points of view: on the one hand, models of galactic chemical evolution have been computed and their predictions compared with the corresponding observational data on the element…
Context. We investigate the grain opacity k_gr in the atmosphere of protoplanets. This is important for the planetary mass-radius relation since k_gr affects the H/He envelope mass of low-mass planets and the critical core mass of giant…
(abridged) We aim to predict the most important parameters for grain-grain collision outcomes for models of interstellar grain population evolution on astrophysical scales: the threshold velocity above which colliding grains shatter, the…