Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 July 2016
The presence of dust in planetary nebulae can be deduced in several ways - from the observed depletions of condensable elements, internal extinction and, most directly, through the detection of infrared emission from the dust grains. We know that there is a substantial amount of dust in planetary nebulae, and that a significant fraction of the total luminosity emerges in the infrared through thermal emission in most objects. However, a number of questions still largely remain unsolved, and perhaps the most pressing of these are that we do not yet have a satisfactory understanding of the ultraviolet, optical or infrared properties of the dust grains and we also do not yet know exactly where the emitting grains are located within the nebulae; for example, are they mixed with the ionized gas, or in neutral inclusions or perhaps in a disk around the central star?