Related papers: Zodiacal light observations and its link with cosm…
Optical images of the nearby star Fomalhaut show a ring of dust orbiting the central star. This dust is in many respects expected to be similar to the zodiacal dust in the solar system. The ring displays a clear brightness asymmetry,…
Astronomical light echoes, the time-dependent light scattered by dust in the vicinity of varying objects, have been recognized for over a century. Initially, their utility was thought to be confined to mapping out the three-dimensional…
Models of the zodiacal light are necessary to convert measured data taken from low Earth orbit into the radiation field outside the solar system. The uncertainty in these models dominates the overall uncertainty in determining the…
When observing an extrasolar planetary system, the most luminous component after the star itself is generally the light scattered and/or thermally emitted by a population of micron-sized dust grains. These grains are expected to be…
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…
The dominant non-instrumental background source for space-based infrared observatories is the zo- diacal light. We present Spitzer Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) measurements of the zodiacal light at 3.6, 4.5, 5.8, and 8.0 {\mu}m, taken as…
When viewed from Earth, most of what we observe of a comet is dust. The influence of solar radiation pressure on the trajectories of dust particles depends on their cross-section to mass ratio. Hence solar radiation pressure acts like a…
We review the development of dust science from the first ground-based astronomical observations of dust in space to compositional analysis of individual dust particles and their source objects. A multitude of observational techniques is…
We draw attention to observational evidence indicating that a substantial fraction of the well-known cosmic celestial diffuse ultraviolet background radiation field is actually due not to dust-scattered starlight, but rather---considering…
Interstellar dust appears in a number of roles in the interstellar medium. Historically, the most familiar one is as a source of extinction in the optical. Absorbed optical and ultraviolet light heats the dust, whence infrared (including…
Debris disks are tenuous, dust-dominated disks commonly observed around stars over a wide range of ages. Those around main sequence stars are analogous to the Solar System's Kuiper Belt and Zodiacal light. The dust in debris disks is…
We present a measurement of the absolute surface brightness of the zodiacal light (3900-5100A) toward a fixed extragalactic target at high ecliptic latitude based on moderate resolution (~1.3A per pixel) spectrophotometry obtained with the…
The past century of interstellar dust has brought us from first ignoring it to finding that it plays an important role in the evolution of galaxies. Current observational results in our galaxy provide a complex physical and chemical…
Zodiacal emission is thermal emission from interplanetary dust. Its contribution to the sky brightness is non-negligible in the region near the ecliptic plane, even in the far-infrared (far-IR) wavelength regime. We analyse zodiacal…
High levels of exozodiacal dust are observed around a growing number of main sequence stars. The origin of such dust is not clear, given that it has a short lifetime against both collisions and radiative forces. Even a collisional cascade…
The diffuse extragalactic background light consists of the sum of the starlight emitted by galaxies through the history of the Universe, and it could also have an important contribution from the first stars, which may have formed before…
Observations of interstellar gas and dust towards nearby stars and within the solar system show that the Sun is embedded in a warm diffuse partially-ionized cloud. This cloud is the leading edge of a flow of interstellar matter (ISM)…
We present a model for the diffuse interstellar dust that explains the observed wavelength-dependence of extinction, emission, linear and circular polarisation of light. The model is set-up with a small number of parameters. It consists of…
(Abridged) Out-of-the-ecliptic trajectories that are beneficial to space observatories such as the Terrestrial Planet Finder and other potential mid-IR missions are introduced. These novel trajectories result in significantly reduced…
Recent advances in astronomical instrumentation mean that we are now able to image the thermal emission from the disks of dust around main sequence stars that may be the fossil remnants of planetary formation. These observations imply that…