Nucleation Processes of Cosmic Dust Investigated by Microgravity Experiments using an Airplane

Abstract

Cosmic dust, which is composed of nanometer-sized particles and is ubiquitously distributed in the universe, is formed in a gas outflow from evolved stars under a microgravity environment. Its formation processes have been studied on the basis of knowledge obtained under the 1 G environment on Earth and is thus not fully understood under realistic conditions. To better understand the process, here, we performed nucleation experiments of dust analogs under a microgravity environment. We show the details of our experiments using an aircraft including results of insitu observation employing an interferometer and ex-situ transmission electron microscopy to reveal the difficulty of nucleation and variability of nucleation processes. Of particular note is the size distribution of the produced particle, which was monotonical in microgravity experiments against a double peak for particles produced in the laboratory. Under a microgravity environment, nucleation tends to suppress because of smaller density fluctuation due to convection free and less turbulence due to smaller Reynolds number which gives atoms/molecules (particles) smaller chance to collide with each other for nucleation (coagulation).