Where does galactic dust come from?

TL;DR

This study models dust production in Milky Way-like galaxies to understand the origin of galactic dust, revealing that supernova dust destruction models underestimate dust mass and cannot fully explain observed dust relations.

Contribution

It demonstrates that current dust production models, including grain destruction effects, are insufficient to match observed dust masses and scaling relations in galaxies.

Findings

Models with SN reverse shock destruction underestimate dust mass by a factor of ~4.

Current models fail to reproduce observed dust-stellar mass and dust-metallicity relations.

Dust production alone cannot explain observed dust properties, implying other processes are involved.

Abstract

Here we investigate the origin of the dust mass (Mdust) observed in the Milky Way (MW) and of dust scaling relations found in a sample of local galaxies from the DGS and KINGFISH surveys. To this aim, we model dust production from Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) stars and supernovae (SNe) in simulated galaxies forming along the assembly of a Milky Way-like halo in a well resolved cosmic volume of 4cMpc using the GAMESH pipeline. We explore the impact of different sets of metallicity and mass-dependent AGB and SN dust yields on the predicted Mdust. Our results show that models accounting for grain destruction by the SN reverse shock predict a total dust mass in the MW that is a factor of ~4 lower than observed, and can not reproduce the observed galaxy-scale relations between dust and stellar masses, and dust-to-gas ratios and metallicity, with a smaller discrepancy in galaxies with low metallicity (12 + log(O/H) < 7.5) and low stellar masses (Mstar < 10^7 Msun). In agreement with previous studies, we suggest that competing processes in the interstellar medium must be at play to explain the observed trends. Our result reinforces this conclusion by showing that it holds independently of the adopted AGB and SN dust yields.