The Life Cycle of Dust

TL;DR

This paper reviews the importance of dust in the interstellar medium, highlighting its role across cosmic scales and emphasizing the need for multi-disciplinary, multi-wavelength studies to understand its life cycle and impact on astrophysical phenomena.

Contribution

It advocates for comprehensive, statistical investigations of dust properties across different cosmic environments using current and future observational tools.

Findings

Dust is present in various astrophysical environments from stars to galaxies.

Understanding dust requires multi-disciplinary and multi-wavelength approaches.

Future instrumentation will enhance the study of dust properties and their evolution.

Abstract

Dust offers a unique probe of the interstellar medium (ISM) across multiple size, density, and temperature scales. Dust is detected in outflows of evolved stars, star-forming molecular clouds, planet-forming disks, and even in galaxies at the dawn of the Universe. These grains also have a profound effect on various astrophysical phenomena from thermal balance and extinction in galaxies to the building blocks for planets, and changes in dust grain properties will affect all of these phenomena. A full understanding of dust in all of its forms and stages requires a multi-disciplinary investigation of the dust life cycle. Such an investigation can be achieved with a statistical study of dust properties across stellar evolution, star and planet formation, and redshift. Current and future instrumentation will enable this investigation through fast and sensitive observations in dust continuum, polarization, and spectroscopy from near-infrared to millimeter wavelengths.