Related papers: Smoking Quasars: a New Source for Cosmic Dust
Intermediate-mass stars end their lives by ejecting the bulk of their envelope via a slow dense wind back into the interstellar medium, to form the next generation of stars and planets. Stellar pulsations are thought to elevate gas to an…
If the background universe is observed through a significant amount of diffusely distributed foreground dust, then studies at optical wavelengths may be severely biased. Previous studies investigating effects of foreground dust on…
The accretion of a cloud of hydrogen at the surface of a small, heavy star produces a high energy mostly dissipated by electromagnetic radiation. The combination of the absorption and the redshift of this radiation by hydrogen explains all…
Stars form within dense cores composed of both gas and dust within molecular clouds. However, despite the crucial role that dust plays in the star formation process, its dynamics is frequently overlooked, with the common assumption being a…
Observations of quasar absorption systems relevant for studies of star formation at redshift 2 </= z </= 4 are briefly reviewed. Emphasis is given on the role played by dust in our understanding of the star formation history of galaxies…
We summarize cm through submm observations of the host galaxies of z ~ 6 quasars. These observations reveal the cool molecular gas (the fuel for star formation), the warm dust (heated by star formation), the fine structure line emission…
We have used the Spitzer Space Telescope to study the dust properties of a sample of star-forming dwarf galaxies. The differences in the mid-infrared spectral energy distributions for these galaxies which, in general, are low metallicity…
Cosmic dust is an important component of the Universe, and its origin, especially at high redshifts, is still unknown. I present a simple but powerful method of assessing whether dust observed in a given galaxy could in principle have been…
Recent IR observations indicate that many massive binary systems present dust formation episodes, in regions close to the stars, during the periastron passage. These systems are known to be high-energy sources, and it is believed that wind…
While dust is a major player in galaxy evolution, its relationship with gas and stellar radiation in the early universe is still not well understood. We combine 3D-HST emission line fluxes with far-UV through far-IR photometry in a sample…
It is pointed out that the total amount of dust in the Universe that is produced in stellar evolution in the entire cosmic time is consistent with the observed amount, if we add to the dust amount inferred for galactic discs the amount…
Context. The presence of dust in the interstellar medium has profound consequences on the chemical composition of regions where stars are forming. Recent observations show that many species formed onto dust are populating the gas phase,…
The abundances of gas and dust (solids and complex molecules) in the interstellar medium (ISM) as well as their composition and structures impact practically all of astrophysics. Fundamental processes from star formation to stellar winds to…
Star formation in half of massive galaxies was quenched by the time the Universe was three billion years old. Very low amounts of molecular gas appear responsible for this, at least in some cases, though morphological gas stabilization,…
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…
There are at least three sources of cosmic quarks in the universe. One, the quark nuggets which may survive beyond a certain baryon number during the phase transition from quarks to hadrons microseconds after the big bang. These quark…
Extrasolar debris disks are the dust disks found around nearby main sequence stars arising from the break-up of asteroids and comets orbiting the stars. Far-IR surveys (e.g., with Herschel) showed that ~20% of stars host detectable dust…
Observations have demonstrated that supernovae efficiently produce dust. This is consistent with the hypothesis that supernovae and asymptotic giant branch stars are the primary producers of dust in the Universe. However, there has been a…
Dust formation in the winds of hot stars is inextricably linked to the classic eruptive state of luminous blue variables (LBVs) because it requires very high mass loss rates, Mdot>10^(-2.5) Msun/year, for grains to grow and for the non-dust…
Dust is formed in the expanding atmosphere during late stages of stellar evolution. Dust influences the dynamics and thermodynamics of the stellar atmosphere by its opacity. The dust opacity depends both on the optical properties of the…