JINGLE – IV. Dust, H I gas, and metal scaling laws in the local universe

Journal article

Scaling laws of dust, H I gas, and metal mass with stellar mass, specific star formation rate, and metallicity are crucial to our understanding of the build-up of galaxies through their enrichment with metals and dust. In this work, we analyse how the dust and metal content varies with specific gas mass (MH I/M⋆) across a diverse sample of 423 nearby galaxies. The observed trends are interpreted with a set of Dust and Element evolUtion modelS (DEUS) – including stellar dust production, grain growth, and dust destruction – within a Bayesian framework to enable a rigorous search of the multidimensional parameter space. We find that these scaling laws for galaxies with −1.0 ≲ log MH I/M⋆ ≲ 0 can be reproduced using closed-box models with high fractions (37–89  per cent⁠) of supernova dust surviving a reverse shock, relatively low grain growth efficiencies (ϵ = 30–40), and long dust lifetimes (1–2 Gyr). The models have present-day dust masses with similar contributions from stellar sources (50–80  per cent⁠) and grain growth (20–50  per cent⁠). Over the entire lifetime of these galaxies, the contribution from stardust (>90  per cent⁠) outweighs the fraction of dust grown in the interstellar medium (<10  per cent⁠). Our results provide an alternative for the chemical evolution models that require extremely low supernova dust production efficiencies and short grain growth time-scales to reproduce local scaling laws, and could help solving the conundrum on whether or not grains can grow efficiently in the interstellar medium.

Authors: De Looze, I; Lamperti, I; Saintonge, A; Relaño, M; Smith, MWL

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Journal: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
• Volume: 496
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 3668–3687
• Publication date: 2020-06-02
• Acceptance date: 2020-04-09
• DOI: 10.1093/mnras/staa1496
• EISSN: 1365-2966
• ISSN: 0035-8711
• Language: English
• Keywords: ISM: abundances; galaxies: star formation; galaxies: evolution; FFR; extinction; ISM: dust