Maximally dusty star-forming galaxies: Supernova dust production and recycling in Local Group and high-redshift galaxies

TL;DR

This paper presents a simple model suggesting that supernovae can produce enough dust to explain observed dust masses in star-forming galaxies across a wide redshift range, with minimal destruction.

Contribution

It introduces a dust production model based on supernova yields that accounts for observed dust masses in diverse galaxy environments and epochs.

Findings

Model explains dust masses from local to high-redshift galaxies.

Supernova dust production can be nearly maximally efficient.

Dust destruction is likely negligible or quickly replenished.

Abstract

Motivated by recent observations suggesting that core-collapse supernovae may on average produce ~0.3 M_sun of dust, we explore a simple dust production scenario which applies to star-forming galaxies in the local environment (the Magellanic Clouds and possibly the Milky Way) as well as to high redshift (sub- millimeter, QSO, Lyman break) galaxies. We assume that the net dust destruction (due to supernova reverse shock, shocks in the interstellar medium, or astration) is negligible on a timescale of 1 Gyr, in which case the dust mass can be estimated as 0.004 times the star-formation rate (for a Chabrier IMF) multiplied by the duration of the star-formation episode. The model can account for observed dust masses over four orders of magnitude and across the redshift range 0-8.4, with dust production rates spanning five orders of magnitudes. This suggests that star-forming galaxies may be seen as maximally dusty, in the sense that a dominant fraction of the dust-forming elements forged in a supernova eventually will go into the solid phase. In turn, this indicates little destruction of supernova dust or almost complete replenishment, on a short time scale, of any dust that is destroyed.