Rutgers University Astrophysics Seminar

Dust plays a central role in regulating astrophysical environments across a wide range of scales. In active galactic nuclei (AGN), radiation pressure on dust launches large-scale winds that couple energy from the black hole to the surrounding galaxy. In star-forming molecular clouds, dust mediates the effects of stellar radiation, regulating star formation and disrupting clouds on local scales. Yet in most theoretical models, dust is treated as perfectly coupled to the gas, a simplification with physical consequences that remain largely unexplored. In this talk, I will present simulations that treat dust as a dynamically independent component and explore how this shapes feedback across these environments. In AGN, I will show that radiation-driven dust-gas decoupling naturally gives rise to clumpy, filamentary wind structure with distinct observable signatures. In star-forming molecular clouds, using the STARFORGE simulation suite, I will show that the same radiation-driven physics redistributes dust around young stars with consequences for stellar metallicities, and that variations in dust properties alone can drive order-of-magnitude changes in star formation efficiency. Together, these results suggest that dust dynamics is a key driver of astrophysical feedback, with implications that span from galaxy evolution down to the properties of individual stars.