Related papers: Millimeter-sized grains in the protostellar envelo…
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…
Dust is formed out of stellar material and is constantly affected by different mechanisms occurring in the ISM. Dust grains behave differently under these mechanisms depending on their sizes, and therefore the dust grain size distribution…
Dust grains coagulate into larger aggregates in dense gas. This changes their size distribution and possibly affects the thermal evolution of star-forming clouds. We here investigate dust coagulation in collapsing pre-stellar cores with…
Context. Matter that falls onto a protoplanetary disk (PPD) from a protostellar envelope is heated before it cools again. This induces sublimation and subsequent re-adsorption of ices that accumulated during the prestellar phase. Aims. We…
Dust grains forming in the extended atmospheres of AGB stars are critical for the heavy mass loss of these cool luminous giants, as they provide radiative acceleration for the stellar winds. Characteristic mid-IR spectral features indicate…
Typical accretion disks around massive protostars are hot enough for water ice to sublimate. We here propose to utilize the massive protostellar disks for investigating the collisional evolution of silicate grains with no ice mantle, which…
Molecular hydrogen has an important role in the early stages of star formation as well as in the production of many other molecules that have been detected in the interstellar medium. In this review we show that it is now possible to study…
This review provides an introduction to presolar grains - preserved stardust from the interstellar molecular cloud from which our solar system formed - found in primitive meteorites. We describe the search for the presolar components, the…
In the context of massive fragmenting protoplanetary discs, Boss (1998) suggested that grains can grow and sediment inside giant planet embryos formed at R ~ 5 AU away from the star. Several authors since then criticised the suggestion.…
Dust constitutes only about one percent of the mass of circumstellar disks, yet it is of crucial importance for the modeling of planet formation, disk chemistry, radiative transfer and observations. The initial growth of dust from…
There is evidence that protoplanetary disks--including the protosolar one--contain crystalline dust grains on spatial scales where the dust temperature is lower than the threshold value for their formation through thermal annealing of…
We argue that impact velocities between dust grains with sizes less than $\sim 0.1$ $\mu m$ in molecular cloud cores are dominated by drift arising from ambipolar diffusion. This effect is due to the size dependence of the dust coupling to…
Recent work identified a growth barrier for dust coagulation that originates in the electric repulsion between colliding particles. Depending on its charge state, dust material may have the potential to control key processes towards planet…
Astronomers have yet to establish whether high-mass protostars form from high-mass prestellar cores, similar to their lower-mass counterparts, or from lower-mass fragments at the heart of a pre-protostellar cluster undergoing large-scale…
We investigate star formation at very early evolutionary phases in five massive clouds in the inner 500 pc of the Galaxy, the Central Molecular Zone. Using interferometer observations of H$_2$O masers and ultra-compact H II regions, we find…
Small amounts of pre-solar grains have survived in the matrices of primitive meteorites and interplanetary dust particles. Their detailed study in the laboratory with modern analytical tools provides highly accurate and detailed information…
Recent observations with dust detectors on board the interplanetary spacecraft Ulysses and Galileo have recorded a substantial flux of large interstellar grains with radii between 0.25 and 2.0 mu entering the solar system from the local…
Star formation in galaxies is a complex phenomenon occurring on a very wide range of scales, and molecular clouds are at the heart of this process. The formation of these structures and the subsequent collapse of the gas within them to form…
Many questions in physical cosmology regarding the thermal history of the intergalactic medium, chemical enrichment, reionization, etc. are thought to be intimately related to the nature and evolution of pregalactic structure. In particular…
The first generation of stars were born a few hundred million years after the big bang. These stars synthesized elements heavier than H and He, that are later expelled into the interstellar medium, initiating the rise of metals. Within this…