Interstellar Dust As A Cosmological Foreground

The purpose of this meeting was to cover selected topics of high current interest in the interplay between cosmology and fundamental physics. It brought together physicists, astrophysicists and astronomers and allowed easy and fruitful mutual contacts and communication among them. Topics covered this year include: phase transitions in cosmology and evolution out of the equilibrium of quantum fields, fundamental strings and cosmic strings in cosmology, dark matter and large scale structure, black holes and quantum gravity.

Interstellar dust grains catalyse chemical reactions, absorb, scatter, polarise and re-radiate starlight and constitute the building blocks for the formation of planets. Understanding this interstellar component is therefore of primary importance in many areas of astronomy & astrophysics. For example, observers need to understand how dust effects l

This volwne is the proceedings of the third school in particle astrophysics that Schramm and Galeotti have organized at Erice. The focus of thirs third school was the Generation of Cosmological Large-Scale Structure. It was held in November of 1996. The fIrst school in the series was on "Gauge Theory and the Early Universe" in May 1986, the second was on "Dark Matter in the Universe" in May 1988. All three schools have been successful under the auspices of the NATO Advanced Study Institute. This volume is thus the third in the series of the proceedings of these schools. The choice of the topic for this third school was natural, since the problem of generating a large-scale structure has become the most pressing problem in cosmology today. In particular, it is this generation of structure that is the interface between astronomical observations and particle models for the early universe. To date, all models for generating structures inevitably require new fundamental physics beyond the standard, SU x SU X U , model of high energy physics. The 3 2 I seeds for generating structures usually invoke unifIcation physics, and the matter needed to clump and form them seems to require particle properties that have not been seen in laboratories to date.

Requiring no astronomical background, this excellent introductory examines the physics of dust particles in interstellar, circumstellar and extragalactic space. After presenting relevant astronomical concepts, the author discusses the physical properties of dust grains, their growth and destruction and the observations of dust in the aforementioned environments.

Are we living in the "golden age" of cosmology? Are we close to understanding the nature of the unknown ingredients of the currently most accepted cosmological model and the physics of the early Universe? Or are we instead approaching a paradigm shift? What is dark matter and does it exist? How is it distributed around galaxies and clusters? Is the scientific community open to alternative ideas that may prompt a new scientific revolution - as the Copernican revolution did in Galileo's time? Do other types of supernovae exist that can be of interest for cosmology? Why have quasars never been effectively used as standard candles? Can you tell us about the scientific adventure of COBE? How does the extraction of the Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropy depend on the subtraction of the various astrophysical foregrounds? These, among many others, are the astrophysical, philosophical and sociological questions surrounding modern cosmology and the scientific community that Mauro D'Onofrio and Carlo Burigana pose to some of the most prominent cosmologists of our time. Triggered by these questions and in the spirit of Galileo's book "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems" the roughly 40 interview partners reply in the form of essays, with a critical frankness not normally found in reviews, monographs or textbooks.