Dust Grain Growth & Dusty Supernovae in Low-Metallicity Molecular Clouds

TL;DR

This study models the evolution of superbubbles in low-metallicity molecular clouds, revealing that dust grain growth and supernovae significantly contribute to dust mass accumulation, explaining observed dust in early galaxies.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed 3-D hydrodynamical simulations of dust growth and supernova dust injection in low-metallicity, clumpy molecular clouds.

Findings

Dust grain growth rate of ~4.8×10⁻⁵ M☉/yr in early superbubble stages

Supernovae contribute approximately 1200 M☉ of dust in the modeled clouds

Dust accumulation occurs efficiently without requiring a top-heavy initial mass function

Abstract

We present 3-D hydrodynamical models of the evolution of superbubbles powered by stellar winds and supernovae from young coeval massive star clusters within low metallicity ($Z = 0.02$Z$_{\odot}$), clumpy molecular clouds. We explore the initial stages of the superbubble evolution, including the occurrence of pair-instability and core-collapse supernovae. Our aim is to study the occurrence of dust grain growth within orbiting dusty clumps, and in the superbubble's swept-up supershell. We also aim to address the survival of dust grains produced by sequential supernovae. The model accounts for the star cluster gravitational potential and self-gravity of the parent cloud. It also considers radiative cooling (including that induced by dust) and a state-of-the-art population synthesis model for the coeval cluster. As shown before, a superbubble embedded into a clumpy medium becomes highly distorted, expanding mostly due to the hot gas streaming through low density channels. Our results indicate that in the case of massive ($\sim10^7$M$_{\odot}$) molecular clouds, hosting a super star cluster ($\sim5.6\times10^5$M$_{\odot}$), grain growth increments the dust mass at a rate $\sim4.8\times10^{-5}$M$_{\odot}$ yr$^{-1}$ during the first $2.5$Myr of the superbubble's evolution, while the net contribution of pair-instability and core-collapse supernovae to the superbubble's dust budget is $\sim1200$M$_{\odot} (M_{SC}/5.6\times10^{5}$M$_{\odot})$, where $M_{SC}$ is the stellar mass of the starburst. Therefore, dust grain growth and dust injection by supernovae lead to create, without invoking a top-heavy initial mass function, massive amounts of dust within low-metallicity star-forming molecular clouds, in accordance with the large dust mass present in galaxies soon after the onset of cosmic reionization.