Context. The Galactic anomalous microwave emission detected between 10 and 90 GHz is a major foreground to CMB fluctuations. Well correlated with dust emission at 100 µm, the anomalous foreground is interstellar but its origin is still debated. Possible carriers for this emission are spinning, small dust grains carrying a permanent electric dipole. Aims. To probe the origin of the anomalous for...

We present new sub-mm observations of Vega excess stars, and consistent modelling for all known Vega excess stars with sub-mm data. Our analysis uses dust grain models with realistic optical properties, with the aim of determining physical parameters of the unresolved disks from just their SEDs. For the resolved targets, we find that different objects require very different dust grain propertie...

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...

For 117 clusters of galaxies, we explore the detectability of intracluster dust grains by current and future infrared facilities, taking into account both collisional heating and sputtering of grains by ambient plasma. If the dust grains are injected into the intergalactic space with the amount and size comparable to the Galactic values, the dust-to-gas ratio is typically 10 and the mean dust t...

In the early 1990s, after its Jupiter flyby, the Ulysses spacecraft identified interstellar dust in the solar system. Since then the in-situ dust detector on board Ulysses continuously monitored interstellar grains with masses up to 10−13 kg, penetrating deep into the solar system. While Ulysses measured the interstellar dust stream at high ecliptic latitudes between 3 and 5 AU, interstellar im...

Introduction: Carbonate is a minor phase in hydrous meteorites and hydrous interplanetary dust particles (IDPs), where it is believed to have formed by aqueous processing on asteroidal parent bodies [1]. Carbonate has been reported in the dust shells around evolved stars [2] and in other interstellar and circumstel-lar environments [3] where liquid water is unlikely to have been present. Toppan...

This paper considers the distribution of dust which originates in the break-up of planetesimals that are trapped in resonance with a planet. The effect of radiation pressure on small dust grains causes their orbits and so their spatial distribution to be significantly different to that of the parent planetesimals which previous work has shown to be clumpy. It is shown that there are three disti...

Coal mining and related industry can increase heavy metals (HMs) concentrations in soil, atmosphere and wheat, thereby posing metal-associated human health risk via food ingestion.  In this study, 58 samples of soil, wheat, and dust were collected from Xuzhou coal mine eastern China, six kinds of HMs Pb, Cd, Cu, Zn, As and Cr were studied for their spatial distribution in wheat, enrichment in d...

Introduction: Dust is the basic building block of all larger bodies formed in the Solar System: planets, their satellites, comets and asteroids. Some of these dust grains have survived 4.56 Gyr of processing, and occur as interplanetary dust particles (IDPs), GEMS (Glass with embedded sulphides) within IDPs and presolar grains in meteorites. Primitive meteorites can also be regarded as aggregat...

Introduction: Dust is the basic building block of all larger bodies formed in the Solar System: planets, their satellites, comets and asteroids. Some of these dust grains have survived 4.56 Gyr of processing, and occur as interplanetary dust particles (IDPs), GEMS (Glass with embedded sulphides) within IDPs and presolar grains in meteorites. Primitive meteorites can also be regarded as aggregat...