Abstract
Amongst the most startling pictures of the night sky are those that involve interstellar dust clouds. They show up as dark patches and striations against more or less uniform starfields, or as bright nebulosity around individual stars or groups of stars. The Trifid Nebula seen in Fig. 1.1 is an example of a region of the Milky Way where dark lanes are superposed on an irregular-shaped complex of clouds of hot emitting gas and dust. These patches are not recesses through the nebula as they were once thought, but rather are caused by the very effective obscuration of background optical radiation by much cooler clouds containing small solid particles. The term ‘interstellar’ grains was given to these particles by Lyman Spitzer Jr., one of the great pioneers of interstellar astronomy.
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Hoyle, F., Wickramasinghe, N.C. (1991). Introduction. In: The Theory of Cosmic Grains. Astrophysics and Space Science Library, vol 168. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3402-6_1
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