Related papers: What can the occult do for you?
The standard method of mapping the interstellar medium in a galaxy, by observing the molecular gas in the CO 1-0 line and the atomic gas in the 21-cm line, is largely limited with current telescopes to galaxies in the nearby universe. In…
The recent results obtained by the modern telescopes and spacecrafts allow us for the first time to compare directly the mass, spatial density and size distribution of the dust grains in the regions of their production, processing and…
The detailed distribution of dust in the disks of spiral galaxies is important to understanding the radiative transfer within disks, and to measuring overall dust masses if significant quantities of dust are either very opaque or very cold.…
3D tomography of the interstellar dust and gas may be useful in many respects, from the physical and chemical evolution of the ISM itself to foreground decontamination of the CMB, or various studies of the environments of specific objects.…
Our ability to interpret observations of galaxies and trace their stellar, gas, and dust content over cosmic time critically relies on our understanding of how the dust abundance and properties vary with environment. Here, we compute the…
Information about the make-up of the galaxy arrives in the Solar system in many forms: photons of different energies, classically collected by ground- and space-based telescopes, neutral and charged atomic particles, and solid macroscopic…
I review the effects of dust obscuration in galaxies at both low and high redshifts, and briefly discuss a method to remove dust reddening from the emerging light of star-forming galaxies. I also analyze the evolution of the dust opacity in…
The gas-to-dust mass ratios found for interstellar dust within the Solar System, versus values determined astronomically for the cloud around the Solar System, suggest that large and small interstellar grains have separate histories, and…
The quantity of dust in a spiral disk can be estimated using the dust's typical emission or the extinction of a known source. In this paper, we compare two techniques, one based on emission and one on absorption, applied on sections of…
In this study, we explore the impact of inhomogeneities in the spatial distribution of interstellar dust on spatial scales of $\le1$ au caused by ion shadowing forces on the optical properties of diffuse interstellar medium (ISM) as well as…
Despite its small mass fraction typically observed in the interstellar medium, dust plays a significant role as a key component of galaxies, affecting a wide range of properties. This review focuses specifically on how dust grains influence…
The opacity of foreground spiral disks can be probed from the number of distant galaxies seen through them. To calibrate this number for effects other than the dust extinction, Gonzalez et al (1998) developed the "Synthetic Field Method". A…
The spatial distribution of compact dark matter in our Galaxy can be determined in a few years of monitoring Galactic globular clusters for microlensing. Globular clusters are the only dense fields of stars distributed throughout the…
The bulk of stars in galaxy clusters are confined within their constituent galaxies. Those stars do not trace the extended distribution of dark matter well as they are located in the central regions of the cluster's dark matter sub-halos. A…
The interstellar thick disks of galaxies contain not only gas, but significant quantities of dust. Most of our knowledge of extraplanar dust in disk galaxies comes from direct broadband optical imaging of these systems, wherein the dust is…
Extinction by intergalactic gray dust introduces a magnitude redshift dependent offset in the standard-candle relation of SN Ia. This leads to overestimated luminosity distances compared to a dust-free universe. Quantifying the amplitude of…
The optical/near-IR stellar continuum carries unique information about the stellar population in a galaxy, its mass function and star-formation history. Star-forming regions display rich emission-line spectra from which we can derive the…
Dust in the diffuse interstellar medium remains incompletely understood with regard to the structure, composition, size distribution, and alignment properties of the grains. Joint observations of reddening, starlight polarisation spectra,…
We have used a Monte Carlo radiative transfer code to produce edge-on images of dusty galactic disks, allowing a fraction of the dust to be distributed in clumps. Synthetic images of edge-on galaxies have been constructed for different…
How dust absorbs and scatters starlight as a function of wavelength (known as the interstellar extinction curve) is crucial for correcting for the effects of dust extinction in inferring the true luminosity and colors of reddened…