Related papers: Interstellar Grains
The deflection of interstellar dust grains in the magnetic field near the heliopause has been investigated based on the assumption that interstellar grains are homogeneous spheres. However, remote observations have shown that interstellar…
The amount of dust estimated from infrared to sub-millimetre (submm) observations strongly depends on assumptions of different grain sizes, compositions and optical properties. Here we use a simple model of thermal emission from cold…
Nanodust, which undergoes stochastic heating by single starlight photons in the interstellar medium, ranges from angstrom-sized large molecules containing tens to thousands of atoms (e.g. polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon molecules) to grains…
Planet formation in protoplanetary discs requires dust grains to coagulate from the sub-micron sizes that are found in the interstellar medium into much larger objects. For the first time, we study the growth of dust grains during the…
Whether ice in cold cosmic environments is physically separated from the silicate dust or mixed with individual silicate moieties is not known. However, different grain models give very different compositions and temperatures of grains. The…
The origin of the grains with diameters less than 4 micron from the inclusions in Antarctic ice cores is discussed. It is proposed that these grains were initiated by ions stopped in the upper atmosphere. The ions form molecules, which…
A composite dust grain model which simultaneously explains the observed interstellar extinction, polarization, IR emission and the abundance constraints, is required. We present a composite grain model, which is made up of a host silicate…
We investigate shattering and coagulation of dust grains in turbulent interstellar medium (ISM). The typical velocity of dust grain as a function of grain size has been calculated for various ISM phases based on a theory of grain dynamics…
Dust grains influence many aspects of star formation, including planet formation, opacities for radiative transfer, chemistry, and the magnetic field via Ohmic, Hall, and ambipolar diffusion. The size distribution of the dust grains is the…
The approach to model composite interstellar dust grains, using the exact solution to the light scattering problem for multi-layered spheres as suggested by Voshchinnikov & Mathis (1999), is further developed. Heterogeneous scatteres are…
It has recently been shown that turbulence in the interstellar medium (ISM) can significantly accelerate the growth of dust grains by accretion of molecules, but the turbulent gas-density distribution also plays a crucial role in shaping…
We present a method for calculating the infrared emission from a population of dust grains heated by starlight, including very small grains for which stochastic heating by starlight photons results in high temperature transients. Because…
Dust grains in neutral gas behave as aerodynamic particles, so they can develop large density fluctuations independent of gas density fluctuations. Specifically, gas turbulence can drive order-of-magnitude 'resonant' fluctuations in the…
Currently ~36 different absorption bands have been detected in the infrared spectra of cold, dense interstellar and circumstellar environments. These are attributed to the vibrational transitions of ~17 different molecules frozen on dust…
Spinning dust grains in front of the bright Galactic synchrotron background can produce a weak absorption signal that could affect measurements of high redshift 21 cm absorption. At frequencies near 80 MHz where the EDGES experiment has…
Interstellar dust is still a dominant uncertainty in Astronomy, limiting precision in e.g., cosmological distance estimates and models of how light is re-processed within a galaxy. When a foreground galaxy serendipitously overlaps a more…
We critically examine the best lines of evidence for grain growth in protoplanetary disks, based on modelling of observed spectral energy distributions and images of T Tauri and Herbig Ae stars. The data are consistent with millimeter-sized…
The size of dust grains, $a$, is key to the physical and chemical processes in circumstellar disks, but observational constraints of grain size remain challenging. (Sub)millimeter continuum observations often show a percent-level…
Debris disks are dusty, gas-poor disks around main sequence stars (Backman & Paresce 1993; Lagrange, Backman & Artymowicz 2000; Zuckerman 2001). Micron-sized dust grains are inferred to exist in these systems from measurements of their…
Recent observations indicate that mm/cm-sized grains may exist in the embedded protostellar disks. How such large grains grow from the micron size (or less) in the earliest phase of star formation remains relatively unexplored. In this…