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 the interstellar solid particle population in the solar vicinity. Especially the distribution of grain masses is indicative of growth and destruction mechanis...

Each giant planet is encircled by planetary rings, usually composed of particles centimeters to meters in radius, but each system also contains regions where much smaller dust grains predominate. This chapter summarizes the techniques used to determine the properties of circumplanetary material, and then gives a precis of the known characteristics of circumplanetary rings (with emphasis on tenu...

CPC: 1.3 Radiative Transfer PACS: 94.10.Gb-Absorption and scattering of radiation 97.21.+a-Pre-main sequence objects, young stellar objects and protostars 97.82.+k-Extrasolar planetary systems Abstract A WWW interface for the simulation of spectral energy distributions of optically thin dust configurations with an embedded radiative source is presented. The density distribution, radiative sourc...

We newly introduce lift force into the aerodynamics of dust grains in a protoplanetary disk. Although many authors have investigated the effects of the drag force, gravitational force, and electric force on the dust grains, the lift force has never been considered as a force exerted on dust grains in a gas disk. We show in this paper that the dust grains can be continuously spinning as a result...

Context. Dust sedimentation is known to affect the infrared spectra and images of disks. In particular the far-infrared emission may be reduced by strong sedimentation. However, dust grains of different sizes sediment to different depths in the disk. Spectral features of one species may thus be enhanced, while those of other species may be suppressed. Aims. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH...

We quantitatively investigate how collisional avalanches may develop in debris discs, as the result of the initial break-up of a planetesimal or comet-like object, triggering a collisional chain reaction due to outward escaping small dust grains. We use a specifically developed numerical code that follows both the spatial distribution of the dust grains and the evolution of their size-frequency...

A quantum pseudo-spin model with random spin sizes is introduced to study the effects of charging-energy disorder on the superconducting transition in granular superconducting materials. Charging-energy effects result from the small electrical capacitance of the grains when the Coulomb charging energy is comparable to the Josephson coupling energy. In the pseudo-spin model, randomness in the sp...

The ion-acoustic instability in a dusty negative ion plasma is investigated, focusing on the parameter regime in which the negative ion density is much larger than the electron density. The dynamics of the massive dust grains are neglected, but collisions of electrons and ions with dust grains in addition to other collisional processes are taken into account. The presence of a population of cha...

Negatively charged, micron-sized dust grains have been electrostatically confined in the high-potential region of an anode double layer formed in a single-ended Q-machine plasma. The levitated dust grains are large enough to be visually observed in the scattered light from the plasma source. The various forces on a dust grain in a plasma, i.e., gravitational, electric, ion drag, and neutral dra...

Motivated by a recent study by Lazarian and Draine, which showed that a high degree of grain alignment of the paramagnetic dust is achievable if the rates of internal relaxation are controlled by the Barnett relaxation process, we undertake a study of an alternative mechanism of internal dissipation, namely, the inelastic dissipation of energy in oblate dust grains. We find that deformations at...