Synonyms
Definition
In addition to the Sun; the planets plus their satellites; smaller bodies including asteroids, comets, and meteoroids; and Kuiper beltobjects, the roughly defined plane of the solar system contains gas and dust, referred to as the interplanetary medium. The dust grains are, naturally, called interplanetary dust particles, although that nomenclature (and particularly the abbreviation IDPs) is often used to designate particles of presumed interplanetary origin collected on the Earth, primarily in the stratosphere but also from Antarctic and Greenland ice. In the interplanetary medium, sunlight scattered by the dust is responsible for the phenomena of the zodiacal light (the “false morning” of poets, including Omar Khayyam) and the gegenschein (a very faint glow in the antisolar direction). In addition, interplanetary dust particles produce meteors (“shooting stars”) when they strike the Earth’s atmosphere and are incinerated as a result of...
References and Further Reading
Davoisne C, Djouadi Z, Leroux H, d’Hendecourt L, Jones AP, Deboffle D (2006) The origin of GEMS in IDPs as deduced from microstructural evolution of amorphous silicates with annealing. Astron Astrophys 448:L1–L4
FitzGerald E (2011) The Rubayat of Omar Khayyam: First and Fifth Editions, Dover Publ, Mineola, New York
Flynn GJ, Keller LP, Jacobsen C, Wirick S (2004) An assessment of the amount and types of organic matter contributed to the Earth by interplanetary dust. Adv Space Res 33:57–66
Jessberger EK, Stephan T, Rost D, Arndt P, Maetz M, Stadermann F, Brownlee DE, Bradley JP, Kurat G (2001) Properties of interplanetary dust: information from collected samples. In: Grün E, Gustafson B, Dermott SF, Fechtig H (eds) Interplanetary dust. Springer, Berlin, pp 254–294
Lasue J, Levasseur-Regourd AC, Fray N, Cottin H (2007) Inferring the interplanetary dust properties from remote observations and simulations. Astron Astrophys 473:641–649
Levasseur-Regourd AC, Lasue J, Desvoivres E (2006) Early inner solar system impactors: physical properties of comet nuclei and dust particles revisited. Orig Life Evol Biosph 36:507–514
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this entry
Cite this entry
Irvine, W.M. (2014). Interplanetary Dust Particle. In: Amils, R., et al. Encyclopedia of Astrobiology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27833-4_796-3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27833-4_796-3
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-27833-4
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Physics and AstronomyReference Module Physical and Materials ScienceReference Module Chemistry, Materials and Physics