Confirming the evolution of the dust mass function in galaxies over the past 5 billion years

Beeston, R. A., Gomez, H. L. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3398-0052, Dunne, L. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9880-2543, Maddox, S. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5549-195X, Eales, S. A. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7394-426X and Smith, M. W. L. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3532-6970 2024. Confirming the evolution of the dust mass function in galaxies over the past 5 billion years. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 535 (4) , pp. 3162-3180. 10.1093/mnras/stae2507

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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 $\rho _{\rm d} =(1.37\pm 0.08)\times 10^5 {\rm \, M_{\odot }\, Mpc^{-3}}\, h_{70}^{-1}$; 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 (ρd∝(1 + z)2.6 ± 0.6), with a flatter evolution than observed in previous FIR-selected studies. We attribute the evolution in ρL and ρm to an evolution in the dust mass.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Physics and Astronomy
Additional Information:	License information from Publisher: LICENSE 1: URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, Start Date: 2024-11-08
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
ISSN:	0035-8711
Funders:	European Research Council, STFC
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	18 November 2024
Date of Acceptance:	1 November 2024
Last Modified:	23 Jan 2025 15:08
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/174127

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