Production, Processing and Consumption of the Dust in the Galaxy

TL;DR

This paper synthesizes recent astronomical observations from multiple telescopes and spacecrafts to analyze the production, processing, and consumption of galactic dust, providing a comprehensive understanding of dust dynamics in the Milky Way.

Contribution

It offers the first integrated comparison of dust mass, density, and size distribution across different galactic regions using diverse observational data.

Findings

Estimated dust production rate of 0.015 solar masses per year for the Galaxy.

Determined the local dust density to be approximately 3.5×10⁻²⁶ g/cm³.

Found consistency among various measurements assuming specific dust grain properties.

Abstract

The recent results obtained by the modern telescopes and spacecrafts allow us for the first time to compare directly the mass, spatial density and size distribution of the dust grains in the regions of their production, processing and consumption in our Galaxy. The ALMA and VLT/SPHERE telescopes allow us to estimate the production of the dust by supergiants and collapsing core supernovae. The 2MASS, WISE, SDSS, Planck and other telescopes allow us to estimate the processing of the dust in the interstellar medium. After renewed Besan\c{c}on Galaxy model the medium appears to contain about half the local mass of matter (both baryonic and dark) in the Galactic neighborhood of the Sun. The Helios, Ulysses, Galileo, Cassini and New Horizons spacecrafts allow us to estimate the consumption of the dust into large solid bodies. The results are consistent each other assuming the local mean spatial density of the dust is about of $3.5\times10^{-26}$ g/cm$^3$, mean density of the grain is about 1 g/cm$^3$, and the dust production rate is about of 0.015 Solar mass per year for whole the Galaxy.