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# Rotational disruption of dust grains by radiative torques in strong radiation fields

## Abstract

Massive stars, supernovae, and kilonovae are among the most luminous radiation sources in the Universe. Observations usually show near- to mid-infrared (NIR–MIR, λ ≈ 1–5 μm) emission excess from H ii regions around young massive star clusters. Early-phase observations in optical-to-NIR wavelengths of type Ia supernovae also reveal unusual properties of dust extinction and dust polarization. The most common explanation for such NIR−MIR excess and unusual dust properties is the predominance of small grains (size a 0.05 μm) relative to large grains (a 0.1 μm) in the local environment of these strong radiation sources. However, why small grains might be predominant in these environments is unclear. Here we report a mechanism of dust destruction based on centrifugal stress within extremely fast-rotating grains spun-up by radiative torques, which we term radiative torque disruption (RATD). We find that RATD can disrupt large grains located within a distance of about a parsec from a massive star of luminosity L ≈ 104L, where L is the solar luminosity, or from a supernova. This disruption effect increases the abundance of small grains relative to large grains and successfully reproduces the observed NIR−MIR excess and anomalous dust extinction/polarization. We apply the RATD mechanism for kilonovae and find that dust within about 0.1 parsec would be dominated by small grains. Small grains produced by RATD can also explain the steep far-ultraviolet rise in extinction curves towards starburst and high-redshift galaxies, and the decrease of the escape fraction of Lyman α photons from H ii regions surrounding young massive star clusters.

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The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Journal peer review information: Nature Astronomy thanks Haley Gomez, Karri Muinonen, Joonas Herranen and the other anonymous reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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## Acknowledgements

We thank B.-G. Andersson, M. Bulla, B. Burkhart, B. T. Draine, A. Goobar, V. Guillet, A. Lazarian, P. Lesaffre, R. Smith, and W. Zheng for comments and discussions. This work was supported by the Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF), funded by the Ministry of Education (2017R1D1A1B03035359).

## Author information

All authors contributed to the work presented in this paper. T.H. formulated the problem, carried out analytical calculations, and led the writing of the manuscript. L.N.T. carried out numerical calculations for supernovae and kilonovae. H.L. carried out calculations for massive stars. S.H.A. contributed to the discussion of the RATD mechanism on Lyα photon escape.

### Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Correspondence to Thiem Hoang.

## Supplementary information

1. ### Supplementary Information

Supplementary text, Supplementary references, Supplementary Figs. 1–2, Supplementary Table 1.

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