Related papers: Overview of Grain Models
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…
In order to interpret observations influenced by dust and to perform detailed modeling of the observable characteristics of dust-producing or dust-containing objects, knowledge of the micro-physical properties of relevant dust species are…
Models of astrophysical dust are key to understand several physical processes, from the role of dust grains as cooling agents in the ISM to their evolution in dense circumstellar disks, explaining the occurrence of planetary systems around…
The matter content of the Universe is generally regarded as a perfect fluid on sufficiently large scales, for all epochs. But the recent cosmological matter distribution, consisting of an (ideally) random distribution of gravitationally…
Recent observations with dust detectors on board the interplanetary spacecraft Ulysses and Galileo have recorded a substantial flux of large interstellar grains with radii between 0.25 and 2.0 mu entering the solar system from the local…
Dust in the diffuse interstellar medium remains incompletely understood with regard to the structure, composition, size distribution, and alignment properties of the grains. Joint observations of reddening, starlight polarisation spectra,…
A previous study (Paper I) investigated the polarization properties of a variety of simple convex grain shapes, some of which were found to be consistent with the observed polarization properties of interstellar dust from far-ultraviolet to…
Nanometer- and micrometer-sized solid particles play an important role in the evolutionary cycle of stars and interstellar matter. The optical properties of cosmic grains determine the interaction of the radiation field with the solids,…
During these last decades, our knowledge of evolutionary and structural properties of stars of different mass and chemical composition is significantly improved. This result has been achieved as a consequence of our improved capability in…
Conventional grain growth is rate-limited by the mobility of grain boundary. To describe similar phenomena limited by the mobility of other grain junctions, we have developed a general theory allowing for size-dependent mobility and its…
Systematic microstructure design requires reliable thermodynamic descriptions of each and all microstructure elements. While such descriptions are well established for most bulk phases, thermodynamic assessment of crystal defects is…
In this analysis we illustrate how the relatively new emission mechanism known as spinning dust can be used to characterize dust grains in the interstellar medium. We demonstrate this by using spinning dust emission observations to…
We study the chemical evolution of interstellar grain mantle by varying the physical parameters of the interstellar medium (ISM). To mimic the exact interstellar condition, gas grain interactions via accretion from the gas phase and…
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…
We extend and investigate the spheroidal model of interstellar dust grains used to simultaneously interpret the observed interstellar extinction and polarization curves. We compare our model with similar models recently suggested by other…
Theoretical studies have revealed that dust grains are usually moving fast through the turbulent interstellar gas, which could have significant effects upon interstellar chemistry by modifying grain accretion. This effect is investigated in…
The complex arrangements of atoms near grain boundaries are difficult to understand theoretically. We propose a phenomenological (Ginzburg-Landau-like) description of crystalline phases based on symmetries and fairly general stability…
We propose a new model for the description of complex granular particles and their interaction in molecular dynamics simulations of granular material in two dimensions. The grains are composed of triangles which are connected by deformable…
We study the effects of dust grain size on the spectral energy distribution (SED) of spherical circumstellar envelopes. Based on the self-similarity relations of dusty SEDs derived by Ivezic & Elitzur (1997), we expect an approximate…
Aligned interstellar grains produce polarized extinction (observed at wavelengths from the far-ultraviolet to the mid-infrared), and polarized thermal emission (observed at far-infrared and submm wavelengths). The grains must be quite…