Infrared Observational Manifestations of Young Dusty Super Star Clusters

TL;DR

This paper models how dust injected by supernovae in young stellar clusters evolves under thermal sputtering, producing infrared signatures that can be observed and analyzed.

Contribution

It introduces a time-dependent model of dust evolution in stellar clusters, incorporating stochastic supernova injection, gas-dust interactions, and radiative processes.

Findings

Infrared spectral signatures depend on dust injection and sputtering dynamics.

Time-dependent IR spectral energy distributions can be predicted for young clusters.

Dust grains are heated by gas collisions, affecting IR emissions.

Abstract

The growing evidence pointing at core-collapse supernovae as large dust producers makes young massive stellar clusters ideal laboratories to study the evolution of dust immersed into a hot plasma. Here we address the stochastic injection of dust by supernovae and follow its evolution due to thermal sputtering within the hot and dense plasma generated by young stellar clusters. Under these considerations, dust grains are heated by means of random collisions with gas particles which results on the appearance of infrared spectral signatures. We present time-dependent infrared spectral energy distributions which are to be expected from young stellar clusters. Our results are based on hydrodynamic calculations that account for the stochastic injection of dust by supernovae. These also consider gas and dust radiative cooling, stochastic dust temperature fluctuations, the exit of dust grains out of the cluster volume due to the cluster wind and a time-dependent grain size distribution.