Dust in brown dwarfs

Abstract

Dust formation in turbulent media is studied adopting the example of brown dwarf atmospheres. By combining asymptotic techniques and time-dependent, multi-dimensional numerical simulations, we show that acoustic waves originating from convective motions provide a mechanism to initiate dust nucleation in otherwise dust-hostile environments. The subsequently growing particles cause a radiative cooling strong enough to re-initiate efficient dust formation resulting in a strongly inhomogeneous distribution of dust in such environments. Recent observations bear indications for such cloudy dust distributions in brown dwarf atmospheres.