1. Confirming the evolution of the dust mass function in galaxies over the past 5 billion years.
- Author
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Beeston, R A, Gomez, H L, Dunne, L, Maddox, S, Eales, S A, and Smith, M W L
- Subjects
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SPECTRAL energy distribution , *GALACTIC evolution , *DUST , *BARYONS , *ENERGY consumption - Abstract
The amount of evolution in the dust content of galaxies over the past 5 billion years of cosmic history is contested in the literature. Here, we present a far-infrared (FIR) census of dust based on a sample of 29 241 galaxies with redshifts ranging from |$0 \lt z \lt 0.5$| using data from the Herschel Astrophysical Terahertz Large Area 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 FIR-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 |$z\lt 0.1$| (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 (|$z\lt 0.1$|) to |$\rho _{\rm d} =(1.37\pm 0.08)\times 10^5 {\rm \, {\rm M}_{\odot }\, Mpc^{-3}}\, h_{70}^{-1}$| ; 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 |$\rho _{\rm L}$| and |$\rho _{\rm m}$| to an evolution in the dust mass. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2024
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