James Webb Space Telescope has recently observed 108 solar masses of cosmic dust merely 600 million years after the big bang. This is too much dust, too soon after the big bang to be produced by any known source other than supernovae. However, explaining the source as supernovae runs into a different problem. How much dust can survive a supernova reverse shock and make it into the surrounding area’s dust budget is an open problem, with estimates for the destruction of this newly formed dust ranging anywhere from 0-99%. What these estimates lack is a detailed picture of the structure of the dust at the time of the reverse shock.
To shed light on this, we have carried out three-dimensional soft sphere Discrete Element Method (DEM) simulations of dust formation in an environment consistent with a supernova remnant in order to test what variables contribute most to the dust’s resulting structure. We find that temperature is an important factor, an effect previously not seen due to the numerical process typically used to grow dust for DEM simulations.