Dust grains from the heart of supernovae

TL;DR

This study introduces a new simulation code to track dust formation and survival in supernovae, estimating that a small but significant fraction of SN-produced dust survives to enrich the interstellar medium, surpassing AGB star contributions.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel code, GRASH_Rev, for modeling dust evolution in supernovae, providing new estimates of dust survival rates and their impact on galactic dust budgets.

Findings

1-8% of dust survives supernova shocks.

SN dust production exceeds AGB star contributions.

Surviving dust is insufficient to balance destruction, implying need for dust growth in ISM.

Abstract

Dust grains are classically thought to form in the winds of asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars. However, there is increasing evidence today for dust formation in supernovae (SNe). To establish the relative importance of these two classes of stellar sources of dust, it is important to know the fraction of freshly formed dust in SN ejecta that is able to survive the passage of the reverse shock and be injected in the interstellar medium. We have developed a new code (GRASH\_Rev) which follows the newly-formed dust evolution throughout the supernova explosion until the merging of the forward shock with the circumstellar ISM. We have considered four well studied SNe in the Milky Way and Large Magellanic Cloud: SN1987A, CasA, the Crab Nebula, and N49. For all the simulated models, we find good agreement with observations and estimate that between 1 and 8$\%$ of the observed mass will survive, leading to a SN dust production rate of $(3.9 \pm 3.7) \times 10^{-4}$ M$_{\odot}$yr$^{-1}$ in the Milky Way. This value is one order of magnitude larger than the dust production rate by AGB stars but insufficient to counterbalance the dust destruction by SNe, therefore requiring dust accretion in the gas phase.