The rapid evolution of dust content in galaxies over the last five billion years

Abstract

AbstractThe Herschel-ATLAS (H-ATLAS) will provide an unrivalled sample of galaxies, probing the normal star-forming submillimetre population of galaxies for the first time. Here, we exploit the Science Demonstration Phase (SDP) data to model the evolution of the interstellar content of galaxies in recent history. The most massive H-ATLAS galaxies show a large increase in the dust content five billion years ago compared to the present epoch. These observations are difficult to explain using standard dust models, one possibility could be contributions from a non-stellar source of dust e.g. grain growth in dense clouds; this would imply that less than 10% of dust would be condensed in stellar atmospheres. Alternatively, an initial mass function which becomes top heavy at high star formation rate densities could also explain this discrepancy.