Kavli Affiliate: Nickolay Y. Gnedin
| First 5 Authors: Clarke J. Esmerian, Nickolay Y. Gnedin, , ,
| Summary:
We model the interstellar dust content of the reionization era with a suite
of cosmological, fluid-dynamical simulations of galaxies with stellar masses
ranging from $sim 10^5 – 10^9 M_{odot}$ in the first $1.2$ billion years of
the universe. We use a post-processing method that accounts for dust creation
and destruction processes, allowing us to systematically vary the parameters of
these processes to test whether dust-dependent observable quantities of
galaxies at these epochs could be useful for placing constraints on dust
physics. We then forward model observable properties of these galaxies to
compare to existing data. We find that we are unable to simultaneously match
existing observational constraints with any one set of model parameters.
Specifically, the models which predict the largest dust masses $D/Z gtrsim
0.1$ at $z = 5$ — because of high assumed production yields and/or efficient
growth via accretion in the interstellar medium — are preferred by constraints
on total dust mass and infrared luminosities, but these models produce far too
much extinction in the ultraviolet, preventing them from matching observations
of $beta_{rm UV}$. To investigate this discrepancy, we analyze the relative
spatial distribution of stars and dust as probed by infrared (IR) and
ultraviolet (UV) emission, which appear to exhibit overly symmetric
morphologies compared to existing data, likely due to the limitations of the
stellar feedback model used in the simulations. Our results indicate that the
observable properties of the dust distribution in high redshift galaxies are a
particularly strong test of stellar feedback.
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