The origin of dust in galaxies across cosmic time

Abstract

We study the dust evolution in galaxies by implementing a detailed dust prescription in the SAGE semi-analytical model for galaxy formation. The new model, called Dusty SAGE, follows the condensation of dust in the ejecta of type II supernovae and asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars, grain growth in the dense molecular clouds, destruction by supernovae shocks, and the removal of dust from the ISM by star formation, reheating, inflows and outflows. Our model successfully reproduces the observed dust mass function at redshift z = 0 and the observed scaling relations for dust across a wide range of redshifts. We find that the dust mass content in the present Universe is mainly produced via grain growth in the interstellar medium (ISM). By contrast, in the early Universe, the primary production mechanism for dust is the condensation in stellar ejecta. The shift of the significant production channel for dust characterises the scaling relations of dust-to-gas (DTG) and dust-to-metal (DTM) ratios. In galaxies where the grain growth dominates, we find positive correlations for DTG and DTM ratios with both metallicity and stellar mass. On the other hand, in galaxies where dust is produced primarily via condensation, we find negative or no correlation for DTM and DTG ratios with either metallicity or stellar mass. In agreement with observation showing that the circumgalactic medium (CGM) contains more dust than the ISM, our model also shows the same trend for z < 4. Our semi-analytic model is publicly available at https://github.com/dptriani/dusty-sage.

Evolution of the grain size distribution in Milky Way-like galaxies in post-processed IllustrisTNG simulations

“…There is an increasing trend of dust-to-gas ratio with decreasing redshift, but the evolutionary track on the tot -is almost invariant. This is consistent with other theoretical models of dust enrichment in cosmological simulations by Hou et al (2019) (at 2) and Li et al (2019), and the semi-analytic model of Popping et al (2017) and Triani et al (2020) (although Vijayan et al 2019 showed an additional dependence on the stellar age). The tight tot -relation is also compatible with the analytical result that metallicity is the main driver of dust enrichment (Inoue 2011).…”

In pursuit of giants

“…In addition, 47 sources (15% of the total sample) form their stellar masses at very short timescales of 100 Myr. Studying the evolution of galaxies in the SAGE semi-analytical model, Triani et al (2020) have found that the grain growth starts to dominate overall dust production if 12 + log(O/H) 8.5 and log(M /M ) 9.2. Here, 84% of our sources fulfil both of these criteria, which implies that the dust grain growth in ISM would be the dominant source of dust production in the vast majority of observed DSFGs.…”

The impact of metallicity-dependent dust destruction on the dust-to-metals ratio in galaxies

“…The SFR, , is not in general a function of the other model parameters, as galaxies grow and evolve due to the accretion and ejection of gas, and occasional mergers (Nanni et al 2020;Triani et al 2020). We assume…”

“…Some studies of dust evolution (e.g. Triani et al 2020) do use a metallicity-dependent destruction efficiency, but to our knowledge, the impact of such an evolving efficiency has not been investigated in detail. In this paper, we show that an increasing destruction efficiency at low metallicity E-mail: priestleyf@cardiff.ac.uk may remove the tension between high stellar dust yields and the low DTM ratios seen in some galaxies, if the dependence on metallicity is strong enough.…”