Understanding the properties of dust produced during the asymptotic giant
branch phase of stellar evolution is important for understanding the evolution
of stars and galaxies. Recent observations of the carbon AGB star R Scl have
shown that observations at far-infrared and submillimetre wavelengths can
effectively constrain the grain sizes in the shell, while the total mass
depends on the structure of the grains (solid vs. hollow or fluffy). We aim to
constrain the properties of the dust observed in the submillimetre in the
detached shells around the three carbon AGB stars U Ant, DR Ser, and V644 Sco,
and to investigate the constraints on the dust masses and grain sizes provided
by far-infrared and submm observations. We observed the carbon AGB stars U Ant,
DR Ser, and V644 Sco at 870 micron using LABOCA on APEX. Combined with
observations from the optical to far-infrared, we produced dust radiative
transfer models of the spectral energy distributions (SEDs) with contributions
from the stars, present-day mass-loss and detached shells. We tested the effect
of different total dust masses and grain sizes on the SED, and attempted to
consistently reproduce the SEDs from the optical to the submm. We derive dust
masses in the shells of a few 10e-5 Msun, assuming spherical, solid grains. The
best-fit grain radii are comparatively large, and indicate the presence of
grains between 0.1 micron-2 micron. The LABOCA observations suffer from
contamination from 12CO(3-2), and hence gives fluxes that are higher than the
predicted dust emission at submm wavelengths. We investigate the effect on the
best-fitting models by assuming different degrees of contamination and show
that far-infrared and submillimetre observations are important to constrain the
dust mass and grain sizes in the shells.Comment: Accepted by A&
