Abstract
The dust reservoir in the interstellar medium of a galaxy is constantly being replenished by dust formed in the stellar winds of evolved stars. Due to their vicinity, nearby irregular dwarf galaxies the Magellanic Clouds provide an opportunity to obtain a global picture of the dust production in galaxies. The Small and Large Magellanic Clouds have been mapped with the Spitzer Space Telescope from 3.6 to 160 {\mu}m, and these wavelengths are especially suitable to study thermal dust emission. In addition, a large number of individual evolved stars have been targeted for 5-40 {\mu}m spectroscopy, revealing the mineralogy of these sources. Here I present an overview on the work done on determining the total dust production rate in the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, as well as a first attempt at revealing the global composition of the freshly produced stardust.
Highlights
Dust is a common ingredient of the interstellar medium (ISM) of galaxies
In the imaging obtained by optical observatories, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, dust manifests itself as dark lanes or patches that are obscuring the light from the stars
It is believed that dust in the interstellar medium is formed by generations of mass-losing evolved stars that gradually increase in metallicity with chemical galactic evolution (Morgan and Edmunds, 2003)
Summary
Dust is a common ingredient of the interstellar medium (ISM) of galaxies. In the imaging obtained by optical observatories, such as the Hubble Space Telescope, dust manifests itself as dark lanes or patches that are obscuring the light from the stars. Srinivasan et al (2009) focused on the carbon-rich, oxygen-rich and extreme AGB star classifications from Blum et al (2006) and using the infrared excess measured at IRAC 8.0 and MIPS 24 μm found that the overall dust injection to the interstellar medium of the LMC is 2.74 × 10−5 M yr−1.
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