Related papers: Can Fluffy Dust Alleviate the "Subsolar" Interstel…
Elements in the interstellar medium (ISM) exist in the form of gas or dust. The interstellar extinction and elemental abundances provide crucial constraints on the composition, size and quantity of interstellar dust. Most of the extinction…
Interstellar dust models are facing a "carbon crisis", so called because recent observations suggest that the abundance of carbon available for dust in the interstellar medium is less than half of the amount required to be tied up in…
We present new interstellar dust models which have been derived by simultaneously fitting the far-ultraviolet to near-infrared extinction, the diffuse infrared (IR) emission and, unlike previous models, the elemental abundance constraints…
A broad array of interstellar absorption features that appear in the ultraviolet spectra of bright sources allows us to measure the abundances and ionization states of many important heavy elements that exist as free atoms in the…
Aims. A sample of early B-type stars in OB associations and the field within the solar neighbourhood is studied comprehensively. Present-day abundances for the astrophysically most interesting chemical elements are derived. Methods.…
Small angle scatterings of X-rays by interstellar dust particles create halos around x-ray sources. By observing these halos with sufficient angular resolution it is possible to derive information about both the spatial distribution of the…
Iron, the Universe's most abundant refractory element, is highly depleted in both circumstellar and interstellar environments, meaning it exists in solid form. The nature of this solid is unknown. In this Letter, we provide evidence that…
The gas-to-dust mass ratios found for interstellar dust within the Solar System, versus values determined astronomically for the cloud around the Solar System, suggest that large and small interstellar grains have separate histories, and…
In the interstellar medium of the Milky Way, certain elements -- e.g., Mg, Si, Al, Ca, Ti, Fe -- reside predominantly in interstellar dust grains. These grains absorb, scatter, and emit electromagnetic radiation, heat the interstellar…
While it is well recognized that both the Galactic interstellar extinction curves and the gas-phase abundances of dust-forming elements exhibit considerable variations from one sight line to another, as yet most of the dust extinction…
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…
The low density interstellar medium (ISM) close to the Sun and inside of the heliosphere provides a unique laboratory for studying interstellar dust grains. Grain characteristics in the nearby ISM are obtained from observations of…
Measurements by dust detectors on interplanetary spacecraft appear to indicate a substantial flux of interstellar particles with masses exceeding 10^{-12}gram. The reported abundance of these massive grains cannot be typical of interstellar…
Recent results on nearby interstellar gas and interstellar byproducts within the solar system are used to select among the equilibrium radiative transfer models of the nearest interstellar material of Slavin and Frisch (2002). Assuming…
We present a model of the interaction of interstellar dust grains with a stellar environment, that predicts the distribution of interstellar dust grains in the size range between $0.1 {\rm \mu m}$ and $1 {\rm \mu m}$ around a star for the…
The content of interstellar clouds, in particular the inventory of diffuse molecular gas, remains uncertain. We identified a sample of isolated clouds, approximately 100 solar masses in size, and used the dust content to estimate the total…
Recent works have demonstrated a surprisingly small variation of the dust-to-metals ratio in different environments and a correlation between dust extinction and the density of stars. Naively, one would interpret these findings as strong…
A representative sample of unevolved early B-type stars in nearby OB associations and the field is analysed to unprecedented precision using NLTE techniques. The resulting chemical composition is found to be more metal-rich and much more…
Our current understanding of the absorption and emission properties of interstellar grains are reviewed. The constraints placed by the Kramers-Kronig relation on the wavelength-dependence and the maximum allowable quantity of the dust…
The abundance evolution of interstellar dust species originating from stellar sources and from condensation in molecular clouds in the local interstellar medium of the Milky Way is studied and the input of dust material to the Solar System…