Modeling the effects of dust evolution on the SEDs of galaxies of different morphological type

TL;DR

This paper develops galaxy evolution models that incorporate dust evolution effects on spectral energy distributions, comparing results with observations to understand dust's role in galaxy light reprocessing.

Contribution

It combines chemical evolution models with spectrophotometric codes to analyze dust effects on galaxy SEDs across different types and redshifts.

Findings

Dust evolution significantly impacts galaxy SEDs.

Models match observed SEDs in local and high-redshift galaxies.

Including dust evolution improves spectral energy distribution predictions.

Abstract

We present photometric evolution models of galaxies, in which, in addition to the stellar component, the effects of an evolving dusty interstellar medium have been included with particular care. Starting from the work of Calura, Pipino & Matteucci (2008), in which chemical evolution models have been used to study the evolution of both the gas and dust components of the interstellar medium in the solar neighbourhood, elliptical and irregular galaxies, it has been possible to combine these models with a spectrophotometric stellar code that includes dust reprocessing (GRASIL) (Silva et al. 1998) to analyse the evolution of the spectral energy distributions (SED) of these galaxies. We test our models against observed SEDs both in the local universe and at high redshift and use them to predict how the percentage of reprocessed starlight evolves for each type of galaxy. The importance of following the dust evolution is investigated by comparing our results with those obtained by adopting simple assumptions to treat this component.