The cycle of interstellar dust in galaxies of different morphological types

Abstract

Aims: We used chemical evolution models for galaxies of different morphological type to perform a detailed study of the evolution of the cosmic dust properties in different environments: the solar neighbourhood, elliptical galaxies and dwarf irregular galaxies. Thanks to the uptodate observations available in the solar vicinity, we intend to study the effects of dust in the chemical evolution of different types of galaxies and, at the same time, to refine investigation of the parameter space to satisfactorily fine-tune the parameters in our study. Methods: We have considered dust production from low and intermediate mass stars, supernovae Ia, supernovae II, and both dust destruction and dust accretion processes in a detailed model of chemical evolution for the solar vicinity. Then, by means of the same dust prescriptions, but adopting different galactic models (different star formation histories and the presence of galactic winds), we extended our study to ellipticals and dwarf irregular galaxies. In all these systems, dust evolution was calculated by means of chemical evolution models that relax the instantaneous recycling approximation and already reproduce the main features of the various galaxies. Results: We have investigated how the assumption of different star formation histories affects the dust production rates, dust depletion, the dust accretion, and destruction rates. We predict dust-to-gas and dust-to-metal ratios in very good agreement with those observed in the solar vicinity. We show how the inclusion of the dust treatment is helpful in solving the so-called Fe discrepancy, as observed in the hot gaseous halos of local ellipticals, and in reproducing the chemical abundances observed in the Lyman Break Galaxies. Finally, our new models can be very useful in future detailed spectro-photometric studies of galaxies. © 2008 ESO.