What determines the grain size distribution in galaxies?

TL;DR

This paper models dust evolution in galaxies, showing how stellar sources and ISM processes like shattering and grain growth shape the grain size distribution over cosmic time.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive dust evolution model that accounts for grain size distribution and identifies the changing dominant processes during galaxy evolution.

Findings

Early galaxy dust is mainly from stellar sources.

Shattering increases small grains, boosting grain growth.

Grain size distribution evolves significantly over 10 Gyr.

Abstract

We construct a dust evolution model taking into account the grain size distribution, and investigate what kind of dust processes determine the grain size distribution at each stage of galaxy evolution. In addition to the dust production by type II supernovae (SNeII) and asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars, we consider three processes in the ISM: (i) dust destruction by SN shocks, (ii) metal accretion onto the surface of preexisting grains in the cold neutral medium (CNM) (called grain growth), and (iii) grain-grain collisions (shattering and coagulation) in the warm neutral medium (WNM) and CNM. We found that the grain size distribution in galaxies is controlled by stellar sources in the early stage of galaxy evolution, and that afterwards the main processes that govern the size distribution changes to those in the ISM. Since shattering produces a large abundance of small grains (consequently, the surface-to-volume ratio of grains increases), it enhances the efficiency of grain growth, contributing to the significant increase of the total dust mass. Grain growth creates a large bump in the grain size distribution around a ~ 0.01 \mu m. Coagulation occurs effectively after the number of small grains is enhanced by shattering, and the grain size distribution is deformed to have a bump at a ~ 0.03 - 0.05 \mu m at t ~ 10 Gyr. We conclude that the evolutions of the total dust mass and the grain size distribution in galaxies are closely related to each other, and the grain size distribution changes considerably through the galaxy evolution because the dominant dust processes which regulate the grain size distribution change.