Dust evolution across cosmic times as seen through DUSTY-GAEA

TL;DR

This paper presents DUSTY-GAEA, an explicit self-consistent implementation of dust formation by stars, destruction by supernova shocks and hot gas, and growth in the dense ISM within the GAEA galaxy formation framework. By tracking dust across three reservoirs and employing two growth formalisms (Dwek/Asano13 and Zhukovska08) alongside star-formation/destruction channels, the study finds that ISM growth dominates the cosmic dust budget up to $z\sim 8$ and that the model can reproduce the dust buildup with stellar mass up to $z\sim 6$ and local dust scaling relations, though reproducing the abundance of very dust-rich galaxies at $z>4$ remains challenging. The fiducial Zhukovska08-based growth model best matches the observed DtoG and DtoM trends, while the Dwek-based implementation shows significant oxygen depletion and weaker correlations with metallicity; the NoG variant demonstrates the necessity of dust growth to sustain high dust masses. The work emphasizes the need for improved high-redshift constraints and for incorporating grain-size physics and molecular hydrogen formation on dust to further refine predictions and disentangle degeneracies in dust formation histories.

Abstract

For many decades, dust has been recognised as an important ingredient in galaxy formation and evolution. This paper presents a novel self-consistent implementation of dust formation by stars, destruction by supernova shocks and hot gas, and growth within the dense interstellar medium (ISM) in the GAEA state-of-the-art galaxy formation model. Our new model, DUSTY-GAEA, reproduces well the dust buildup as a function of stellar mass out to z $\sim$ 6, the scaling relations between the dust-to-gas/dust-to-metal ratios and stellar mass/metallicty in the local Universe, and the dust mass function in the local Universe and out to z $\sim$ 1. In the framework of our model, dust growth dominates the cosmic dust budget out to z $\sim$ 8, and we find that observational constraints beyond the local Universe can be reproduced only assuming such efficient dust growth in the dense ISM. Yet, reproducing the estimated number densities of dust-rich galaxies at higher redshifts remains challenging, as found also in independent theoretical work. We discuss our model predictions in comparison with both observational data and independent theoretical efforts, and highlight how further observational constraints at high redshifts would help constrain dust models.

Figures (15)

• Figure 1: Normalized histograms of the estimated density of the warm intercloud medium (top) and cold molecular gas (bottom) from z $\sim$ 0 to z $\sim$ 5.5. Predictions are based on the MSI merger trees. We limited the distributions to resolved galaxies (see Section \ref{['results']} for details).
• Figure 2: The dust mass as a function of the stellar mass at different redshifts. The solid olive lines represent the median predictions from our fiducial model (DUSTY-GAEA), while the dashed and dash-dotted lines correspond to predictions from DUSTY-GAEA-Dwek and DUSTY-GAEA-NoG, respectively. Shaded areas represent the 16th-84th percentile region. The solid vertical lines indicate the transition between predictions based on MSII and MSI. Symbols represent observational data from Clark15 (crosses), Remy15 (squares), Grossi15 (up triangles), DeVis19 (hexagons), Nersesian19 (right triangles), Beeston18 (left triangles), Santini14 (diamonds), Rowlands14 (circles), daCunha15 (stars), and Pozzi20 (down triangles).
• Figure 3: The dust formation, destruction and growth rates as predicted by the DUSTY-GAEA model. The solid-dashed, solid and dashed-dotted lines represent the dust formation rates by stars, destruction by SNe forward shocks, and growth in the dense ISM, receptively. Shaded areas represent the 16th-84th percentile region. The solid vertical lines indicate the transition between predictions based on MSII and MSI.
• Figure 4: The dust-to-gas (DtoG) ratio as a function of the stellar mass at different redshifts. Line styles and shaded areas have the same meaning as in figure \ref{['fig3']}. Symbols represent the observational data by Grossi15 (up triangles), Nersesian19 (right triangles), and DeVis19 (hexagons). Open symbols correspond to cases where only atomic hydrogen was used to estimate the total gas mass.
• Figure 5: The dust-to-metal (DtoM) ratio normalized to the Milky Way value (i.e. 0.44) as a function of the stellar mass at different redshifts. Line styles and shaded areas have the same meaning as in figure \ref{['fig3']}. Symbols represent the observational data by Grossi15 (up triangles) and DeVis19 (hexagons). Open symbols indicate cases where only atomic hydrogen was used to estimate the gas mass. The blue lines represent theoretical predictions by Vijayan19.