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This Letter investigates the amount of dust in the intergalactic medium (IGM). The dust photoelectric heating can be the most efficient heating mechanism in the IGM where the density is very small and there are a lot of hard ultraviolet…
The in-situ detection of interstellar dust grains in the Solar System by the dust instruments on-board the Ulysses and Galileo spacecraft as well as the recent measurements of hyperbolic radar meteors give information on the properties of…
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…
The nature of the Local Interstellar Cloud (LIC) is highly constrained by the combination of in situ heliospheric and line-of-sight data towards nearby stars. We present a new interpretation of the LIC components of the absorption line data…
Around 16% of the solar-like stars in our neighbourhood show IR-excesses due to debris discs and a fraction of them are known to host planets. We aim to determine in a homogeneous way the metallicity of a sample of stars with known debris…
I review a technique for interpreting faint galaxy data which traces the evolution with cosmic time of the galaxy luminosity density, as determined from several deep spectroscopic samples and the HDF. The method relies on the rest frame UV…
The Sun is depleted in refractory elements compared to nearby solar twins, which may be linked to the formation of giant or terrestrial planets. Here we present high-resolution, high signal-to-noise spectroscopic data for 17 solar-like…
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…
The new observational data on interstellar dust, obtained during the past few years, in particular, revised ISM elemental abundances, the polarization curve from the far UV to the near IR, spectra of dust infrared emission, extended red…
Contemporary interstellar dust has never been analyzed in the laboratory, despite its obvious astronomical importance and its potential as a probe of stellar nucleosynthesis and galactic chemical evolution. Here we report the discovery of a…
Young stars with masses 2-8 Suns, called the Herbig Ae and Be stars, often show a near-infrared excess too large to explain with a hydrostatically-supported circumstellar disk of gas and dust. At the same time the accretion flow carrying…
Fluorine is one of the most interesting elements for nuclear and stellar astrophysics. Fluorine abundance was first measured for stars other than the Sun in 1992, then for a handful metal-poor stars, which are likely to have formed in the…
Since in situ studies and interplanetary dust collections only provide a spatially limited amount of information about the interplanetary dust properties, it is of major importance to complete these studies with properties inferred from…
The theory for the formation of the first population of stars (Pop III) predicts an initial mass function (IMF) dominated by high-mass stars, in contrast to the present-day IMF, which tends to yield mostly stars with masses less than 1…
Far-infrared Spitzer observations of elliptical galaxies are inconsistent with simple steady state models of dust creation in red giant stars and destruction by grain sputtering in the hot interstellar gas at T ~ 10^7 K. The flux at 24…
Around 2% of all A stars have photospheres depleted in refractory elements. This is hypothesized to arise from a preferential accretion of gas rather than dust, but the specific processes and the origin of the material -- circum- or…
Ultraviolet spectra of stars recorded by orbiting observatories since the 1970's have revealed absorption features produced by atoms in their favored ionization stages in the neutral ISM of our Galaxy. Most elements show abundances relative…
We test emission models of circum-nuclear dust torii around quasars, at low and high redshifts, by using a large collection of photometric data for an unbiased sample of 120 optically-selected objects with millimetric and sub-millimetric…
(Abridged) We assemble a sample of 3258 low-redshift galaxies from the SDSS DR6 with complementary photometric observations by GALEX, 2MASS and IRAS at far-ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths. We use a recent, simple but physically…
We investigate stellar elemental abundance patterns at z = 0 in 8 low-mass (M_* = 10^6 - 10^9 M_sun) galaxies in the Feedback in Realistic Environments (FIRE-2) cosmological simulations. Using magnesium (Mg) as a representative…