Related papers: Pixie Dust: The Silicate Features in the Diffuse I…
Disintegrating planets are ultra-short-period exoplanets that appear to have a comet-like dust tail. They are commonly interpreted as low-mass planets whose solid surface is evaporating and whose tail is made of recondensing minerals.…
While beta Pic is known to host silicates in ring-like structures, whether the properties of these silicate dust vary with stellocentric distance remains an open question. We re-analyze the beta Pictoris debris disk spectrum from the…
We investigate the spatial distribution of chemical abundances in a sample of low metallicity Wolf-Rayet (WR) galaxies selected from the SDSS. We used the integral field spectroscopy technique in the optical spectral range (3700-6850 AA)…
Interstellar dust permeates our Galaxy and plays an important role in many physical processes in the diffuse and dense regions of the interstellar medium. High-resolution X-ray spectroscopy, coupled with modelling based on laboratory dust…
It is well known that the dust properties of the diffuse interstellar medium exhibit variations towards different sight-lines on a large scale. We have investigated the variability of the dust characteristics on a small scale, and from…
We present the results based on multiwavelength imaging observations of the prominent dust lane starburst galaxy NGC 1482 aimed to investigate the extinction properties of dust existing in the extreme environment. (B-V) colour-index map…
The dynamical structure and infrared emission of winds around late-type stars are studied in a self-consistent model that couples the equations of motion and radiative transfer. Both the dynamics and IR spectrum of the solution are fully…
Employing the Maximum Entropy Method algorithm, we fit interstellar extinction measurements which span the wavelength range 0.125-3 micron. We present a uniform set of MEM model fits, all using the same grain materials, optical constants…
Silicate carbon stars show the 10 micron silicate emission, despite their carbon-rich photospheres. They are considered to have circumbinary or circum-companion disks, which serve as a reservoir of oxygen-rich material shed by mass loss in…
The joint use of accurate near- and mid-infrared photometry from the 2MASS and WISE catalogues has allowed the variations of the extinction law and the dust grain size distribution in high Galactic latitudes (|b|>50) at distances up to 3…
We survey the Si K edge structure in various absorbed Galactic low-mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs) to study states of silicon in the inter- and circum-stellar medium. The bulk of these LMXBs lie toward the Galactic bulge region and all have…
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…
We consider a small sample of oxygen-rich, asymptotic giant branch stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud, observed by the Spitzer Space Telescope, exhibiting a peculiar spectral energy distribution, which can be hardly explained by the common…
The dielectric function of interstellar dust material is modeled using observations of extinction and polarization in the infrared, together with estimates for the mass of interstellar dust. The "astrodust" material is assumed to be a mix…
The inner disk of the young star PDS 70 may be a site of rocky planet formation, with two giant planets detected further out. Solids in the inner disk may inform us about the origin of this inner disk water and nature of the dust in the…
Carbon dioxide is one of the three most abundant species within the ice mantles around dust grains inside molecular clouds. Since a substantial amount of interstellar grains is made of siliceous materials, we have studied the infrared…
We discuss the interstellar absorption lines found in FUSE spectra of the Wolf-Rayet binary Sk 108, located in the northeastern part of the main ``bar'' of the Small Magellanic Cloud. The spectra cover the wavelength range 988-1187…
The unusual extinction curves of SN 2010jl provide an excellent opportunity to investigate the properties of dust formed by core-collapse supernovae. By using a series of dust models with different compositions and grain size distributions,…
We investigate the impact of dust-induced gas fragmentation on the formation of the first low-mass, metal-poor stars (< 1Msun) in the early universe. Previous work has shown the existence of a critical dust-to-gas ratio, below which dust…
Recent ground-based mid-infrared spectra of 29 late-type stars, most with substantial dust shells, are compared to ground-based spectra of these stars from the 1960s and 1970s and to IRAS-LRS spectra obtained in 1983. The spectra of about…