Interstellar dust evolution in galaxies of different morphological types

TL;DR

This paper models the evolution of interstellar dust across different galaxy types, revealing how dust production and destruction depend on galaxy morphology and star formation history, and matching observations.

Contribution

It extends existing dust evolution models to ellipticals and dwarf irregulars, providing new insights into dust production, destruction, and their observational implications.

Findings

Dust destruction depends on element condensation temperatures.

Elliptical galaxies' dust mainly from Type Ia supernovae.

Models reproduce observed dust masses in local ellipticals.

Abstract

We study interstellar dust evolution in various environments by means of chemical evolution models for galaxies of different morphological types. We start from the formalism developed by Dwek (1998) to study dust evolution in the solar neighbourhood and extend it to ellipticals and dwarf irregular galaxies, showing how the evolution of the dust production rates and of the dust fractions depend on the galactic star formation history. The observed dust fractions observed in the solar neighbourhood can be reproduced by assuming that dust destruction depends the condensation temperatures T_c of the elements. In elliptical galaxies, type Ia SNe are the major dust factories in the last 10 Gyr. With our models, we successfully reproduce the dust masses observed in local ellipticals (~10^6 M_sun) by means of recent FIR and SCUBA observations. We show that dust is helpful in solving the iron discrepancy observed in the hot gaseous halos surrounding local ellipticals. In dwarf irregulars, we show how a precise determination of the dust depletion pattern could be useful to put solid constraints on the dust condensation efficiencies. Our results will be helpful to study the spectral properties of dust grains in local and distant galaxies.