Interstellar dust production, destruction and effects of dust depletion in galaxies

Abstract

Despite its small mass fraction typically observed in the interstellar medium, dust plays a significant role as a key component of galaxies, affecting a wide range of properties. This review focuses specifically on how dust grains influence interstellar chemical abundances and on the processes that regulate the evolution of the galactic dust budget. I describe the main physical processes regulating dust evolution, including production by stars and other sources, destruction in supernova shocks and interstellar growth and how they are included in galactic chemical evolution models and simulations. I discuss the main effects of interstellar dust on the abundances measured in various high-redshift systems that include Damped Lyman alpha absorbers detected along the lines of sight of distant quasars and in the absorption spectra of Gamma Ray Burst afterglows. I discuss the measure of the dust mass in galaxies and review its global budget, evaluated through the study of the evolution of the comoving dust mass density, for which I present an up-to-date compilation of data chosen from the literature. Interstellar dust growth plays a critical role in regulating the dust budget, for which I present a list of evidence both in favour of it and against. The dust budget at high redshift is one aspect that requires attention to drive significant progress in the future, along with the investigation of the properties of dust in local, low-metallicity systems. Our poor theoretical knowledge of basic aspects related to dust evolution evidences the need for a new high-sensitivity space telescope operating in the far-infrared regime, still awaited by the community since the demise of Herschel.

Figures (19)

• Figure S1: The coloured lines show the Integrated Galactic Initial Mass Function (IGIMF) as a function of stellar mass and star formation rate for different values of the slope parameter $\beta$ defined in Eq. \ref{['e:ECMF']}, representing the slope of the embedded young stellar cluster mass function. Upper panel: $\beta=1$; central panel: $\beta=1.6$; lower panel: $\beta=2$. In each panel, the black dashed lines indicate the Salpeter (1955)salpeter1955 IMF. Figure from Palla et al. palla2020b.
• Figure S2: Dust condensation efficiencies of C, O, Mg, Si and Fe for AGB stars as reported in Piovan et al. (2011)piovan2011 for various metallicities. Figure from Gioannini et al. gioannini2017a.
• Figure S3: Observed dust mass evolution in SN remnants as a function of the 'Age' of the remnant, in many cases defined as the time after the explosion or the time past the maximum visual light. The collected data are for various SN remnants, including SN 1987A (blue symbols) Cas A and Crab (green squares; see Gall et al.gall2018 for more details and references). The red bars indicate warm dust ($T>100$ K) measurements. The gray area illustrates a possibly increasing trend, followed by a flattening of the dust mass, characterised by significant scatter. Figure from Gall et al.gall2018.
• Figure S4: Dust condensation efficiencies of the elements C (empty circles and continuous lines), O (diamonds and dashed line), Mg (triangles and dotted line), Si (six-pointed stars and dot-dashed lines), Ca (squares and solid lines), S (yellow squares and solid lines) and Fe (five-pointed stars and dashed lines) in type II Supernovae as a function of the progenitor mass, according to the unmixed (upper panels) and mixed (lower panels) grain models of Nozawa et al. nozawa2003nozawa2007 and at various values of the hydrogen number density $n_H$ (left: $n_H=0.1$cm$^{-3}$; centre: $n_H=1$cm$^{-3}$; right: $n_H=10$cm$^{-3}$). The small crosses represent extrapolations of the dust yields to other mass ranges. Figure adapted from Piovan et al. piovan2011.
• Figure S5: Theoretical and observational dust yields from low and intermediate mass stars and core-collapse SNe at solar metallicity ($Z=Z_{\odot}$). Panel (a): dust yields (expressed in $M_{\odot}$) from AGB stars computed by Rowlands et al. rowlands2014 (black solid line) , Dwek/Calura et al. dwek1998calura2008 (blue dotted line), Ferrarotti & Gail ferrarotti2006 (purple dashed line) and Ventura et al. ventura2012 (red solid line) The shaded light-blue region shows the minimum average dust yield per AGB star required to explain observations of high-redshift submillimetre galaxies michalowski2010. Panel (b): comparison of some theoretical dust yields from core-collapse SNe with observations. Black solid line: Todini & Ferrara todini2001; blue dotted line: Dwek/Calura et al. dwek1998calura2008; red solid line: Sarangi & Cherchneff sarangi2013. The upper and lower purple dashed lines show the range of expected yields from the theoretical SN dust formation model of Bianchi & Schneider bianchi2007 that survived the passage of the reverse shock and considering two different gas densities. The shaded light blue region shows the average dust yield per SN required to explain observations of high-redshift submillimetre galaxies. The observed dust masses from some Galactic and nearby young SNRs are indicated by the shaded purple regions (Rowlands et al. rowlands2014 and references therein). The boxes indicate the range of dust mass values derived from IR–submillimetre data as well as uncertainties in the mass of the progenitor starsmichalowski2010. Figure adapted from Rowlands et al. rowlands2014.