The global dust SED: Tracing the nature and evolution of dust with DustEM

Understand

The Planck and Herschel missions are currently measuring the farIR-mm emission of dust, which combined with existing IR data, will for the first time provide the full SED of the galactic ISM dust emission with an unprecedented sensitivity and angular resolution.

• It will allow a systematic study of the dust evolution processes that affect the SED.
• Here we present a versatile numerical tool, DustEM, that predicts the emission and extinction of dust given their size distribution and their optical and thermal properties.
• In order to model dust evolution, DustEM has been designed to deal with a variety of grain types, structures and size distributions and to be able to easily include new dust physics.