Confirming the Evolution of the Dust Mass Function in Galaxies over the past 5 Billion Years

TL;DR

This study uses Herschel data to analyze how the dust mass function in galaxies has evolved over the last 5 billion years, revealing significant changes in dust content and temperature with cosmic time.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive far-infrared census of galaxy dust content over 0<z<0.5, revising local dust mass density and confirming evolution in dust mass and luminosity density.

Findings

Dust temperatures increase with galaxy brightness at low redshift.

Dust mass density has evolved as (1+z)^{2.6 ± 0.6} over the past few billion years.

The dust mass function shape differs from optically-selected galaxy samples.

Abstract

The amount of evolution in the dust content of galaxies over the past five billion years of cosmic history is contested in the literature. Here we present a far-infrared census of dust based on a sample of 29,241 galaxies with redshifts ranging from 0 < z < 0.5 using data from the Herschel Astrophysical Terahertz Survey (H-ATLAS). We use the spectral energy distribution fitting tool MAGPHYS and a stacking analysis to investigate the evolution of dust mass and temperature of far-infrared-selected galaxies as a function of both luminosity and redshift. At low redshifts, we find that the mass-weighted and luminosity-weighted dust temperatures from the stacking analysis both exhibit a trend for brighter galaxies to have warmer dust. In higher redshift bins, we see some evolution in both mass-weighted and luminosity-weighted dust temperatures with redshift, but the effect is strongest for luminosity-weighted temperature. The measure of dust content in galaxies at z<0.1 (the Dust Mass Function) has a different shape to that derived using optically-selected galaxies from the same region of sky. We revise the local dust mass density (z<0.1) to $\rho_{\rm d} =(1.37\pm0.08)\times 10^5 {\rm\,M_{\odot}\,Mpc^{-3}}\,h_{70}^{-1}$; corresponding to an overall fraction of baryons (by mass) stored in dust of $f_{\rm mb} {(\rm dust)} = (2.22\pm 0.13) \times 10^{-5}$. We confirm evolution in both the luminosity density and dust mass density over the past few billion years ($\rho_{\rm d} \propto (1+z)^{2.6 \pm 0.6}$), with a flatter evolution than observed in previous FIR-selected studies. We attribute the evolution in $\rho_L$ and $\rho_m$ to an evolution in the dust mass.