Related papers: The Binding Energies of Atoms on Amorphous Silicat…
Sticking of H and D atoms on interstellar dust grains is the first step in molecular hydrogen formation, which is a key reaction in the InterStellar Medium (ISM). After studying the sticking coefficients of H2 and D2 molecules on amorphous…
The interstellar medium (ISM) is all but empty. To date, more than 300 molecules have already been discovered. Because of the extremely low temperature, the gas-phase chemistry is dominated by barrierless exothermic reactions of radicals…
In the denser and colder ($\leq$20 K) regions of the interstellar medium (ISM), near-infrared observations have revealed the presence of sub-micron sized dust grains covered by several layers of H\textsubscript{2}O-dominated ices and…
Silicate dust grains in the interstellar medium are known to be mostly amorphous, yet crystalline silicate grains have been observed in many long-period comets and in protoplanetary disks. Annealing of amorphous silicate grains into…
Cosmic dust models are key ingredients in advancing our understanding of astronomical environments as diverse as interstellar clouds in galaxies, circumstellar envelopes around evolved and young stars, and protoplanetary disks. Such models…
The energy to desorb atomic oxygen from an interstellar dust grain surface, $E_{\rm des}$, is an important controlling parameter in gas-grain models; its value impacts the temperature range over which oxygen resides on a dust grain.…
We investigate the IR spectral features of a sample of D-type symbiotic stars. Analyzing unexploited ISO-SWS data, deriving the basic observational parameters of dust bands and comparing them with respect to those observed in other…
We aim to constrain the dust mass and grain sizes in the interaction regions between the stellar winds and the ISM around asymptotic giant branch stars. By describing the dust in these regions, we aim to shed light on the role of low mass…
One of the major obstacles to accurately model the interstellar chemistry is an inadequate knowledge about the binding energy (BE) of interstellar species with dust grains. In denser region of molecular cloud, where very complex chemistry…
The knowledge of the binding energy of molecules on astrophysically relevant ices can help to obtain an estimate of the desorption rate, i.e. the molecules residence time on the surface. This represents an important parameter for…
The temperature of interstellar dust particles is of great importance to astronomers. It plays a crucial role in the thermodynamics of interstellar clouds, because of the gas-dust collisional coupling. It is also a key parameter in…
An accurate knowledge of the mineralogy (chemical composition and crystal structure) of the silicate dust in the interstellar medium (ISM) is crucial for understanding its origin in evolved stars, the physical and chemical processing in the…
Silicon is present in interstellar dust grains, meteorites and asteroids, and to date thirteen silicon-bearing molecules have been detected in the gas-phase towards late-type stars or molecular clouds, including silane and silane…
We investigate the equilibrium charge distribution of dust grains in the interstellar medium (ISM). Our treatment accounts for collisional charging by electrons and ions, photoelectric charging due to a background interstellar radiation…
Advanced telescopes, such as ALMA and JWST, are likely to show that the chemical universe may be even more complex than currently observed, requiring astrochemical modelers to improve their models to account for the impact of new data.…
A wealth of data from the Herschel and Planck satellites and now from ALMA, revealing cold dust thermal emission, is available for astronomical environments ranging from interstellar clouds, cold clumps, circumstellar envelops, and…
The formation of grains in the interstellar medium, i.e., at low temperature, has been proposed as a possibility to solve the lifetime problem of cosmic dust. This process lacks a firm experimental basis, which is the goal of this study. We…
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…
We investigate the dust growth in oxygen-rich stellar outflows for a set of nine well-observed massive supergiants with optically thin dust shells. Models of the infrared emission from their circumstellar dust shells are compared to their…
For decades ever since the early detection in the 1990s of the emission spectral features of crystalline silicates in oxygen-rich evolved stars, there is a long-standing debate on whether the crystallinity of the silicate dust correlates…