Dust formation in early galaxies

By H. Morgan, M. Edmunds. 2003

213 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigate the sources and amount of dust in early galaxies. We discuss dust nucleation in stellar atmospheres using published extended atmosphere models, stellar evolution tracks and nucleation conditions. The thermally pulsating asymptotic giant branch phase of intermediate-mass stars is likely to be the most promising site for dust formation in stellar winds. We present an elementary model including dust formation time-scales in which the amount of dust in the interstellar medium is governed by chemical evolution. The implications of the model for high-redshift galaxies are investigated and we show there is no difficulty in producing dusty galaxies at redshifts above 5 if supernovae are a dominant source of interstellar dust. If dust does not condense efficiently in supernovae then significant dust masses can only be generated at z > 5 by galaxies with a high star formation efficiency. This is consistent with the high star formation rates implied by submillimetre sources found in deep Submillimetre Common User Bolometric Array surveys. We find the visual optical depth for individual star-forming clouds can reach values greater than 1 at very low metallicity (1/100 solar) provided that the mass–radius exponent of molecular clouds is less than 2. Most of the radiation from star formation will emerge at infrared wavelengths in the early Universe provided that dust is present. The (patchy) visual optical depth through a typical early galaxy will, however, remain less than 1 on average until a metallicity of 1/10 solar is reached.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e20c5aadae0bde71b9573110f654cc0e489788b4

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Citations in the corpus

• Fragmentation of star-forming clouds enriched with the first dust (2006, background): “Dust condensation in the atmospheres of AGB stars requires time-scales of 1-2 Gyr (Morgan & Edmunds 2003), too long to account for the presence of large dust masses at redshifts z > 5, when the age of the Universe is 1.2 Gyr.”
• Evolution of interstellar dust and stardust in the solar neighbourhood (2007, methodology): “…models for the evolution of the dust content of galaxies have already been constructed (e.g. Lisenfeld & Ferrara 1998; Hirashita 2000; Edmunds 2001; Morgan & Edmunds 2003; Inoue 2003), but these are too simplistic to allow for a detailed calculation of the composition of the interstellar dust…”
• The dust content of galaxies from z = 0 to z = 9 (2016, methodology): “Most advances in dust chemistry in galaxy formation were made using specialised models (e.g. Dwek 1998; Hirashita, Tajiri & Kamaya 2002; Inoue 2003; Morgan & Edmunds 2003; Zhukovska, Gail & Trieloff 2008; Valiante et al. 2009; Asano et al. 2013; Zhukovska 2014; Feldmann 2015).”
• Evolution of Dust in Primordial Supernova Remnants: Can Dust Grains Formed in the Ejecta Survive and Be Injected into the Early Interstellar Medium? (2007, background): “The presence of these large quantities of dust at such an early epoch, when the universe was P1 Gyr old, suggests the rapid enrichment with dust that formed in the explosive ejecta of short-lived massive stars (Morgan & Edmunds 2003; Maiolino et al. 2004b; Dwek et al. 2007).”
• The global gas and dust budget of the Large Magellanic Cloud: AGB stars and supernovae, and the impact on the ISM evolution (2009, background): “One possibility is SFRs, as suggested by Morgan & Edmunds (2003).”
• Stellar Evolutionary Effects on the Abundances of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons and Supernova-Condensed Dust in Galaxies (2007, background): “Such distinct evolutionary trends of SN- and AGB-produced dust with time were predicted byDwek (1998) andmore recently by Morgan & Edmunds (2003).”
• A COOL DUST FACTORY IN THE CRAB NEBULA: A HERSCHEL STUDY OF THE FILAMENTS (2012, background): “This shortfall in the dust mass estimated from AGB stars is also observed in dusty high-redshift galaxies where the timescales for dust production are close to, or shorter than, the lifetime of a typical low-mass AGB star (Morgan & Edmunds 2003; Dwek et al. 2007).”
• Production of dust by massive stars at high redshift (2011, methodology): “In models of dust evolution in galaxies and high-z QSOs (e.g., Morgan and Edmunds, 2003; Dwek et al, 2007) a Salpeter IMF is often used.”
• Stellar sources of dust in the high-redshift Universe (2009, background): “In fact, AGB stellar lifetimes (108 to 109 yr) are comparable to the age of Universe at redshift> 6 (Morgan & Edmunds 2003; Marchenko 2006).”
• Evolution of asymptotic giant branch stars. II. Optical to far-infrared isochrones with improved TP- (2007, background): “This is particularly true for the envelopes of AGB stars, which are believed to be one of the two main producers of interstellar grains, the other being the supernovae blast waves (e.g. Dwek 1998; Todini & Ferrara 2001; Morgan & Edmunds 2003; Calura et al. 2007).”
• The Evolution of Dust in the Early Universe with Applications to the Galaxy SDSS J1148+5251 (2007, background): “The importance of SN condensates as important contributors to the abundance of inter- stellar dust was previously recognized by many authors (Dwek & Scalo 1980; Eales & Edmunds 1996; Dwek 1998; Tielens 1998; Edmunds 2001; Morgan & Edmunds 2003).”
• THE HERSCHEL REFERENCE SURVEY: DUST IN EARLY-TYPE GALAXIES AND ACROSS THE HUBBLE SEQUENCE (2011, background): “…sources: (1) the dust is formed in the old stellar population in the atmospheres of AGB stars, (2) the dust is acquired externally as the result of a galaxy merger or a tidal interaction, and (3) the dust has the same rather uncertain sources as in latetype galaxies (e.g., Morgan & Edmunds 2003).”
• Herschel-ATLAS: rapid evolution of dust in galaxies over the last 5 billion years (2010, methodology): “The life cycle of dust is thus a complicated process which many have attempted to model (Dwek 1998; Morgan & Edmunds 2003; Calura, Pipino & Matteucci 2008; Gall, Andersen & Hjorth 2011) and yet the basic statistic describing the dust content of galaxies – the dust mass function (DMF) – is not well…”
• Dust formation and survival in supernova ejecta (2007, background): “It is difficult for the dust to have originated from lowmass evolved stars at z > 5 as their evolutionary timescales (108 to 109 yr) are comparable to the age of the Universe at that time (Morgan & Edmunds 2003; Marchenko 2006).”
• First detection of [CII]158 μm at high redshift : vigorous star formation in the early universe (2005, methodology): “We did not include detailed models for the evolution of dust (Morgan & Edmunds, 2003), nor the possible contribution of dust from SNe (Maiolino et al., 2004), we simply scaled the the abundance of dust grains and PAHs proportionally to the carbon abundance.”
• The dust scaling relations of the Herschel Reference Survey (2012, unknown): “Here we assumeχ1 =0.2 (Morgan & Edmunds 2003),χ2 =0.5 (Zhukovska et al. 2008),p = 0.012 andα =0.80 (i.e., consistent with a Chabrier 2003 IMF),δ =0.3 (Edmunds 2001) andǫ =0.5.”
• Freshly Formed Dust in the Cassiopeia A Supernova Remnant as Revealed by the Spitzer Space Telescope (2007, background): “…is limited, because the amount of dust built up over time is strongly dependent on the initial mass function, stellar evolution models, and star formation rates (Morgan & Edmunds 2003), and destruction rates in supernovae are believed to be important at timescales greater than a few billion years.”