The cosmic dust rate across the Universe

Abstract

We investigate the evolution of interstellar dust in the Universe by means of chemical evolution models of galaxies of different morphological types, reproducing the main observed features of present day galaxies. We adopt the most updated prescriptions for dust production from supernovae and asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars as well as for dust accretion and destruction processes. Then, we study the cosmic dust rate in the framework of three different cosmological scenarios for galaxy formation: i) a pure luminosity scenario (PLE), ii) a number density evolution scenario (DE), as suggested by the classical hierarchical clustering scenario and iii) an alternative scenario, in which both spirals and ellipticals are allowed to evolve in number on an observationally motivated basis. Our results give predictions about the evolution of the dust content in different galaxies as well as the cosmic dust rate as a function of redshift. Concerning the cosmic dust rate, the best scenario is the alternative one, which predicts a peak at 2 < z < 3 and reproduces the cosmic star formation rate. We compute the evolution of the comoving dust density parameter Ω dust and find agreement with data for z < 0.5 in the framework of DE and alternative scenarios. Finally, the evolution of the average cosmic metallicity is presented and it shows a quite fast increase in each scenario, reaching the solar value at the present time, although most of the heavy elements are incorporated into solid grains, and therefore not observable in the gas phase.

Galactic Archaeology at High Redshift: Inferring the Nature of GRB Host Galaxies from Abundances

“…This parameter varies with galactic type, increasing from spheroids to spirals and irregulars, in agreement with previous works (e.g. Gioannini et al 2017a). (6) represents the outflow rate of the element i due to galactic winds (GWs), developing when the thermal energy of the gas (heated by SNe explosions and stellar winds) exceeds its binding energy (for details see Bradamante et al 1998).…”

“…We have checked that the present time absolute SFRs for a spiral and irregular galaxy reproduce the values found for the Milky Way disk (SF Rubele et al 2015), respectively. These histories of star formation had been already tested in previous papers (Grieco et al 2012;Gioannini et al 2017a) and ensure us that we can reasonably reproduce a galaxy of a given morphological type. However, since real galaxies show a distinctive spread in their properties we have also considered a range of values for the adopted parameters, as shown in Table 3.…”

“…In this work, we assume that Type Ia SNe do not produce any dust, as in Gioannini et al (2017bGioannini et al ( , 2017a.…”

The dust mass function from z ∼0 to z ∼2.5

“…In that model, the redshift evolution of the galaxy populations has been computed on the basis of a phenomenogical approach (see Pozzi et al 2015). The predictions of Gioannini et al (2017) significantly overestimate our data at z > 1, however they are consistent with the decrease in the comoving dust density at z < 1 as found in this study.…”

“…In Fig. 6 we also show the predictions from two models: the semi-analytic model from Popping et al (2017) 1 and the prediction from the chemical model of Gioannini et al (2017).…”