Dust production in supernovae

Abstract

The question `Are supernovae important sources of dust?' is a contentious one. Condensation theory and observations of dust at very high redshifts suggests that they should be, since only massive stars evolve quickly enough to produce the large quantities of dust seen at such early times in the Universe. However, observations with IRAS and ISO have only detected very small amounts of hot dust in supernova remnants, not enough to make them significant sources of dust. Here, we present new observations of two young Galactic remnants with SCUBA, and show that large quantities of dust are indeed produced by supernovae.