Infrared Observational Manifestations of Young Dusty Super Star Clusters

The growing evidence pointing at core-collapse supernovae as large dust producers makes young massive stellar clusters ideal laboratories to study the evolution of dust immersed into a hot plasma. Here we address the stochastic injection of dust by supernovae and follow its evolution due to thermal sputtering within the hot and dense plasma generated by young stellar clusters. Under these considerations, dust grains are heated by means of random collisions with gas particles which results on the appearance of infrared spectral signatures. We present time-dependent infrared spectral energy distributions which are to be expected from young stellar clusters. Our results are based on hydrodynamic calculations that account for the stochastic injection of dust by supernovae. These also consider gas and dust radiative cooling, stochastic dust temperature fluctuations, the exit of dust grains out of the cluster volume due to the cluster wind and a time-dependent grain size distribution.
Comment: 28 pages, 7 figures, Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal