Related papers: Interstellar Grains: 50 Years On
Primitive meteorites contain small amounts of presolar minerals that formed in the winds of evolved stars or in the ejecta of stellar explosions. Silicon carbide is the best studied presolar mineral. Based on its isotopic compositions it…
We show that grains can be efficiently aligned by interacting with a subsonic gaseous flow. The alignment arises from grains having irregularities that scatter atoms with different efficiency in the right and left directions. The grains…
Since the discovery of the first extra-solar planets, we are confronted with the puzzling diversity of planetary systems. Processes like planet radial migration in gas-disks and planetary orbital instabilities, often invoked to explain the…
The interaction of dust grains originating from the local interstellar cloud with the environment inside the heliosphere is investigated. As a consequence of this interaction the spatial distribution of interstellar dust grains changes with…
Context. Interstellar surface chemistry is a complex process that occurs in icy layers accumulated onto grains of different sizes. Efficiency of surface processes often depends on the immediate environment of adsorbed molecules. Aims. We…
This review describes our current understanding of interstellar extinction. This differ substantially from the ideas of the 20th century. With infrared surveys of hundreds of millions of stars over the entire sky, such as 2MASS,…
Contemporary interstellar dust has never been analyzed in the laboratory, despite its obvious astronomical importance and its potential as a probe of stellar nucleosynthesis and galactic chemical evolution. Here we report the discovery of a…
Interstellar matter (ISM) sets the boundary conditions of the heliosphere and dominates the interplanetary medium. The heliosphere configuration has varied over recent history, as the Sun emerged from the Local Bubble and entered a…
The detection of interstellar radionuclides in geological archives provides insights into nucleosynthesis in stars and stellar explosions as well as interstellar medium dynamics in the Local Bubble and the Local Interstellar Cloud. In this…
Cosmic magnetic fields are an integral component of the interstellar medium (ISM), having influence on scales ranging from star formation to galactic dynamics. While observations of external galaxies offer a `birds-eye-view' of magnetic…
Ever since the pioneering study of Spitzer, it has been widely recognized that grains play an important role in the heating and cooling of photo-ionized environments. This includes the diffuse ISM, as well as H II regions, planetary…
The secular evolution process, which slowly transforms the morphology of a galaxy over its lifetime, could naturally account for observed properties of the great majority of physical galaxies if both stellar and gaseous accretion processes…
A critical discourse is provided on the current status of the astrophysics of galaxies in view of open fundamental questions on the law of gravitation and the physics-driven variation of the galaxy-wide stellar initial mass function…
By radiation transfer models with a realistic power spectra of the projected density distributions, we show that the optical properties of grains are poorly constrained by observations of reflection nebulae. The ISM is known to be…
Recent observations in the 21cm line with the Green Bank Telescope have changed our view of the neutral interstellar medium (ISM) in several ways. The new data show that in the inner parts of the Milky Way the disk-halo interface is…
Grain alignment is a notoriously difficult problem, that is extremely rich in underlying physics. The long history of attempts theoretical handling of the problem resulted in rather sceptical approach to the theory on the part of some…
From an anthropological point of view, the whole concept of a "path of progress" in astronomical discovery is anathema, since it implicitly downgrades other cultural perspectives, such as the many "indigenous cosmologies" that still exist…
The past century of interstellar dust has brought us from first ignoring it to finding that it is an important component of the interstellar medium and plays an important role in the evolution of galaxies, the formation of stars and…
Observations of interstellar extinction and polarization indicate that the interstellar medium consists of aligned non-spherical dust grains which show variation in the interstellar extinction curve for wavelengths ranging from NIR to UV.…
Radiative torques, due to the absorption and scattering of starlight, are thought to play a major role in the alignment of grains with the interstellar magnetic field. The absorption of radiation also gives rise to recoil torques,…