Gas-to-dust mass ratios in local galaxies over a 2 dex metallicity range

By A. R'emy-Ruyer, S. Madden, F. Galliano, M. Galametz, T. Takeuchi, R. Asano, S. Zhukovska, V. Lebouteiller, D. Cormier, A. Jones and 9 more. 2013

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Aims. The goal of this paper is to analyse the behaviour of the gas-to-dust mass ratio (G/D) of local Universe galaxies over a wide metallicity range. We especially focus on the low-metallicity part of the G/D vs metallicity relation and investigate several explanations for the observed relation and scatter.Methods. We assembled a total of 126 galaxies, covering a 2 dex metallicity range and with 30% of the sample with 12 + log(O/H)≤ 8.0. We homogeneously determined the dust masses with a semi-empirical dust model including submm constraints. The atomic and molecular gas masses have been compiled from the literature. We used two XCO scenarios to estimate the molecular gas mass: the Galactic conversion factor, XCO,MW, and a XCO that depends on the metallicity XCO,Z (∝Z-2). We modelled the observed trend of the G/D with metallicity using two simple power laws (slope of –1 and free) and a broken power law. Correlations with morphological type, stellar masses, star formation rates, and specific star formation rates are also discussed. We then compared the observed evolution of the G/D with predictions from several chemical evolution models and explored different physical explanations for the observed scatter in the G/D values.Results. We find that out of the five tested galactic parameters, metallicity is the main physical property of the galaxy driving the observed G/D. The G/D versus metallicity relation cannot be represented by a single power law with a slope of –1 over the whole metallicity range. The observed trend is steeper for metallicities lower than ~8.0. A large scatter is observed in the G/D values for a given metallicity: in metallicity bins of ~0.1 dex, the dispersion around the mean value is ~0.37 dex. On average, the broken power law reproduces the observed G/D best compared to the two power laws (slope of –1 or free) and provides estimates of the G/D that are accurate to a factor of 1.6. The good agreement of observed values of the G/D and its scatter with respect to metallicity with the predicted values of the three tested chemical evolution models allows us to infer that the scatter in the relation is intrinsic to galactic properties, reflecting the different star formation histories, dust destruction efficiencies, dust grain size distributions, and chemical compositions across the sample. Conclusions. Our results show that the chemical evolution of low-metallicity galaxies, traced by their G/D, strongly depends on their local internal conditions and individual histories. The large scatter in the observed G/D at a given metallicity reflects the impact of various processes occurring during the evolution of a galaxy. Despite the numerous degeneracies affecting them, disentangling these various processes is now the next step.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/19c07204e872f6257f13649ce608e2a6e76c5691

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

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2. R. Somerville
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Citations in the corpus

• PHIBSS: Unified Scaling Relations of Gas Depletion Time and Molecular Gas Fractions (2017, methodology): “In the case of the dust methods (2) and (3) we assume that the dust-to-gas ratio is nearly linearly correlated with metallicity, at least for metallicities 12+log(O/H)>~8, as found in Leroy et al. (2011) and Rémy-Ruyer et al. (2014).”
• A z = 0 Multiwavelength Galaxy Synthesis. I. A WISE and GALEX Atlas of Local Galaxies (2019, background): “Dwarf galaxies tend to have less dust and fainter infrared emission than more massive galaxies (see Melisse & Israel 1994; Lisenfeld & Ferrara 1998; Dale et al. 2009; Rémy-Ruyer et al. 2014).”
• The dust content of galaxies from z = 0 to z = 9 (2016, methodology): “At metallicities larger than 0.1 Z , the 2 To derive dust-to-metal ratios from the Rémy-Ruyer et al. (2014a) work, we first converted the listed values for 12 + log(O/H) into gas phase metallicities Z assuming 12 + log(O/H) = 8.69 corresponds to Z .”
• COMBINED CO AND DUST SCALING RELATIONS OF DEPLETION TIME AND MOLECULAR GAS FRACTIONS WITH COSMIC TIME, SPECIFIC STAR-FORMATION RATE, AND STELLAR MASS (2014, background): “…mo as M M where 12 + log(O/H) again is the gas phase oxygen abundance (see also Draine et al 2007 for dust-to-gas with metallicity scalings of the SINGS nearby galaxy sample, and Galametz et al (2011) or Rémy-Ruyer et al. (2014) for lower metallicity galaxies down to 12+log(O/H)=8.0).”
• Evolution of the dust emission of massive galaxies up to z=4 and constraints on their dominant mode of star formation (2014, methodology): “The second method is based on the estimate of the dust mass, which is then converted into gas mass using the locally-calibrated relation between the gas-to-dust ratio and the gas metallicity (e.g., Muñoz-Mateos et al. 2009; Leroy et al. 2011; Rémy-Ruyer et al. 2014).”
• REGULARITY UNDERLYING COMPLEXITY: A REDSHIFT-INDEPENDENT DESCRIPTION OF THE CONTINUOUS VARIATION OF GALAXY-SCALE MOLECULAR GAS PROPERTIES IN THE MASS-STAR FORMATION RATE PLANE (2013, positive): “…extinction between ISM regions where only the CO molecule or both CO and H2 are found, is calculated as in Equation 26 in Bolatto et al. (2013), except that we adopt an underlying double power-law relation between gas-to-dust ratio and metallicity in keeping with Rémy-Ruyer et al. (2014).”
• The applicability of far-infrared fine-structure lines as star formation rate tracers over wide ranges of metallicities and galaxy types (2014, background): “…SFR from Hα emission, SFRW3/SFRHα, with decreasing metallicity reported in Lee et al. (2013), which was attributed to the low dust-to-gas ratios of metal-poor galaxies (e.g., Rémy-Ruyer et al. 2014), making the reprocessing of UV photons by dust inefficient (Schurer et al. 2009; Hwang et al. 2012).”
• The assembly of ‘normal’ galaxies at z ∼ 7 probed by ALMA (2015, background): “This is very likely a consequence of the dust content scaling with metallicity (e.g. Rémy-Ruyer et al. 2014; Draine et al. 2007).”
• simba: Cosmological simulations with black hole growth and feedback (2019, methodology): “Guided by computations of Bianchi & Schneider (2007), we choose the dust condensation efficiency of Type II SNe δSNII i,dust = 0.15 to match the low-metallicity end of the observed relation between dust-to-gas mass ratios (DGR) and gas-phase metallicities (Rémy-Ruyer et al. 2014).”
• The Herschel Dwarf Galaxy Survey - I. Properties of the low-metallicity ISM from PACS spectroscopy (2015, background): “…Rémy-Ruyer et al. (2013) and has revealed, among other results, the presence of warmer dust than in metal-rich galaxies, the presence of an excess emission in the submm in several dwarf galaxies, and lower dust-to-gas mass ratios than expected at the lowest metallicities (Rémy-Ruyer et al. 2014).”