Theoretical clues about dust accumulation and galaxy obscuration at high and low redshift

TL;DR

This paper uses a chemodynamical model to explore how dust accumulates and obscures galaxies at different redshifts, highlighting the dominant dust production mechanisms in various galaxy types.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive set of 40 scenarios analyzing dust formation and accumulation across galaxy masses and star formation efficiencies, emphasizing the role of ISM accretion.

Findings

In high star formation systems, ISM accretion dominates dust growth before the star formation peak.

Low star formation systems, especially small galaxies, show prolonged differences based on dust coagulation efficiency.

Dust-to-gas ratio variations are more spread than dust mass, aiding in galaxy and dust evolution studies.

Abstract

Since the epoch of cosmic star formation peak at $z \sim 2$, most of it is obscured in high mass galaxies, while in low mass galaxies the radiation escapes unobstructed. During the reionization epoch, the presence of evolved, dust obscured galaxies are a challenge to galaxy formation and evolution models. By means of a chemodynamical evolution model, we investigate the star formation and dust production required to build up the bulk of dust in galaxies with initial baryonic mass ranging from $7.5 \times 10^{7}$~M$_\odot$ to $2.0 \times 10^{12}$~M$_\odot$. The star formation efficiency was also chosen to represent the star formation rate from irregular dwarf to giant elliptical galaxies. We adopted a dust coagulation efficiency from \citep[][Case A]{dwek1998evolution} as well as a lower efficiency one (Case B), about five times smaller than Case A. All possible combination of these parameters was computed, summing forty different scenarios. We find that in high stellar formation systems the dust accretion in ISM rules over stellar production before the star formation peak, making these systems almost insensible to dust coagulation efficiency. In low star formation systems, the difference between Case A and B lasts longer, mainly in small galaxies. Thus, small irregular galaxies should be the best place to discriminate different dust sources. In our observational sample, taken from the literature, dust-to-gas ratio tends to be more spread only than dust mass, for both stellar mass and star formation rate. Dust-to-gas vs. dust-to-star diagram is a good tracer for both galaxy and dust evolution, due to the link between gas, star, dust and star formation rate. However, the model do not constrain simultaneously all this quantities. The new generation facilities (such as JWST, ELT, VLT and SPICA) will be indispensable to constrain dust formation across the cosmic time.