Modeling Dust Grain Opacity with Mie Scattering

Dust grain opacity is crucial in astrophysical environments: affecting the radiative transfer of energy in proto-planetary disks, thermal equilibrium and cooling, and the reddening and extinction effects of dust on observations. Accurately modeling dust opacity depends on considerations of dust composition, size distributions, and the wavelength-dependent optical properties of dust species. Mie theory describes the scattering of light by a homogeneous spherical particle. It allows for calculations of absorption and scattering cross-sectional contributions from different compositions and size distributions of spherical dust grains across a large wavelength range. We introduce a Mie scattering code, mieScat, used to calculate the opacity of varying dust grain populations.