Related papers: Interstellar Grains -- The 75th Anniversary
Our current understanding of interstellar dust is summarized at an introductory level. Submicron-sized interstellar dust grains absorb and scatter light, and reradiate the absorbed energy in the infrared. The grain population spans a range…
Our understanding of the nature of interstellar grains has evolved considerably over the past half century with the present author and Fred Hoyle being intimately involved at several key stages of progress. The currently fashionable…
This review surveys the observed properties of interstellar dust grains: the wavelength-dependent extinction of starlight, including absorption features, from UV to IR; optical luminescence; IR emission; microwave emission; optical, UV, and…
The past century of interstellar dust has brought us from first ignoring it to finding that it is an important component of the interstellar medium and plays an important role in the evolution of galaxies, the formation of stars and…
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…
Interstellar dust is a key physical ingredient of galaxies, obscuring star formation, regulating the heating and cooling of the gas, and building-up chemical complexity. In this manuscript, I give a wide review of interstellar dust…
We consider the lifecycle of dust introduced into the hot interstellar medium in isolated elliptical galaxies. Dust grains are ejected into galactic-scale cooling flows in large ellipticals by normal mass loss from evolving red giants.…
Interstellar polarization in the optical/infrared has long been known to be due to asymmetrical dust grains aligned with the magnetic field and can potentially provide a resource effective way to probe both the topology and strength of the…
This article is based on an invited talk given by V. P. Kulkarni at the 8th Cosmic Dust meeting. Dust has a profound effect on the physics and chemistry of the interstellar gas in galaxies and on the appearance of galaxies. Understanding…
This article gives an overview of the constitution, physical conditions and observables of dust in the interstellar medium of nearby galaxies. We first review the macroscopic, spatial distribution of dust in these objects, and its…
Nine lectures reviewing the astrophysics of dust in interstellar clouds. Topics include: (1) Summary of observational evidence concerning interstellar dust: broadband extinction, scattering of starlight, polarization of starlight,…
This review describes our current understanding of interstellar extinction. This differ substantially from the ideas of the 20th century. With infrared surveys of hundreds of millions of stars over the entire sky, such as 2MASS,…
Studies of dust scattering properties in astrophysical objects with Milky Way interstellar dust are reviewed. Such objects are reflection nebulae, dark clouds, and the Diffuse Galactic Light (DGL). To ensure their basic quality, studies had…
Interstellar dust appears in a number of roles in the interstellar medium. Historically, the most familiar one is as a source of extinction in the optical. Absorbed optical and ultraviolet light heats the dust, whence infrared (including…
The review contains an analysis of the observed and model curves of the interstellar extinction and polarization. The observations mainly give information on dust in diffuse and translucent interstellar clouds. The features of various dust…
We are living in a dusty universe: dust is ubiquitously seen in a wide variety of astrophysical environments, ranging from circumstellar envelopes around cool red giants to supernova ejecta, from diffuse and dense interstellar clouds and…
Interstellar dust spans a wide range in size distribution, ranging from ultrasmall grains of a few Angstroms to micrometer-size grains. While the presence of nanometer-size dust grains in the Galactic interstellar medium was speculated six…
Dust grains in the interstellar medium interact with photons across the electromagnetic spectrum. They are generally photon energy converters, absorbing short wavelength radiation and emitting long wavelength radiation. Sixty years ago in…
The properties of interstellar grains can now be defined by a rapidly growing wealth of observational data. We rely upon models to combine these data with unobserved properties such as the size distribution of grains, their structure 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…