The role of dust destruction and dust growth in the evolution of the interstellar medium

TL;DR

This study uses chemodynamical simulations to explore how dust destruction and growth processes influence the interstellar medium's properties, revealing key parameters that align models with observations and highlighting metallicity's role in dust distribution.

Contribution

Introduces a new simulation framework with parameters for dust destruction and growth, providing insights into their effects on galactic dust, gas, and metals, and comparing results with observations of the M101 galaxy.

Findings

Low dust destruction and high sticking coefficient increase dust mass.

Simulated dust-metallicity relations match observations for specific parameter ranges.

Metallicity primarily drives dust spatial distribution in galaxies.

Abstract

We use Milky Way-like chemodynamical simulations with a new treatment for dust destruction and growth to investigate how these two processes affect the properties of the interstellar medium in galaxies. We focus on the role of two specific parameters: f_des (a new parameter that determines the fraction of dust destroyed in a single gas particle surrounding supernova) and C_s (the probability that a metal atom or ion sticks to the dust grain after colliding, i.e., the sticking coefficient) in regulating the amount and distribution of dust, cold gas and metals in galaxies. We find that simulated galaxies with low f_des and/or high C_s values produce not only more dust, but they also have a shallower correlation between dust surface density and total gas surface density, and a steeper correlation between dust-to-gas ratio and metallicity. Only for values of f_des between 0.01 and 0.02, and of C_s between 0.5 and 1 our simulations produce an average slope of the dust-to-gas ratio versus metallicity relation consistent with observations. f_des values correspond to a range of a total fraction of dust destroyed by a single supernova between 0.42 and 0.44. Lastly, we compare predictions of several simulations (with different star formation recipes, gas fractions, central metallicities, and metallicity gradients) to the spatially resolved M101 galaxy, and conclude that metallicity is the primary driver of the spatial distribution of dust, while dust-to-gas ratio controls the cold gas distribution, as it regulates the atomic-to-molecular hydrogen conversion rate.