Palla, M, De Looze, I, Relaño, M, van der Giessen, S, Dayal, P, Ferrara, A, Schneider, R, Graziani, L, Algera, HSB, Aravena, M, Bowler, RAA, Hygate, APS, Inami, H, van Leeuwen, I, Bouwens, R, Hodge, J, Smit, R, Stefanon, M and van der Werf, P (2024) Metal and dust evolution in ALMA REBELS galaxies: insights for future JWST observations. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 528 (2). pp. 2407-2427. ISSN 0035-8711

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Abstract

Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations revealed the presence of significant amounts of dust in the first Gyr of Cosmic time. However, the metal and dust build-up picture remains very uncertain due to the lack of constraints on metallicity. JWST has started to reveal the metal content of high-redshift targets, which may lead to firmer constraints on high-redshift dusty galaxies evolution. In this work, we use detailed chemical and dust evolution models to explore the evolution of galaxies within the ALMA Reionization Era Bright Emission Line Survey (REBELS) survey, testing different metallicity scenarios that could be inferred from JWST observations. In the models, we track the build-up of stellar mass using non-parametric star formation histories for REBELS galaxies. Different scenarios for metal and dust evolution are simulated by allowing different prescriptions for gas flows and dust processes. The model outputs are compared with measured dust scaling relations, by employing metallicity-dependent calibrations for the gas mass based on the [C II] 158 μm line. Independently of the galaxies metal content, we found no need for extreme dust prescriptions to explain the dust masses revealed by ALMA. However, different levels of metal enrichment will lead to different dominant dust production mechanisms, with stardust production dominant over other interstellar medium dust processes only in the metal-poor case. This points out how metallicity measurements from JWST will significantly improve our understanding of the dust build-up in high-redshift galaxies. We also show that models struggle to reproduce observables such as dust-to-gas and dust-to-stellar ratios simultaneously, possibly indicating an overestimation of the gas mass through current calibrations, especially at high metallicities.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	0201 Astronomical and Space Sciences; Astronomy & Astrophysics
Subjects:	Q Science > QB Astronomy Q Science > QC Physics
Divisions:	Astrophysics Research Institute
Publisher:	Oxford University Press (OUP)
SWORD Depositor:	A Symplectic
Date Deposited:	20 Aug 2024 12:22
Last Modified:	20 Aug 2024 12:30
DOI or ID number:	10.1093/mnras/stae160
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/23998

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