On the (in)variance of the dust-to-metals ratio in galaxies

Understand

Recent works have demonstrated a surprisingly small variation of the dust-to-metals ratio in different environments and a correlation between dust extinction and the density of stars.

• Naively, one would interpret these findings as strong evidence of cosmic dust being produced mainly by stars.
• But other observational evidence suggest there is a significant variation of the dust-to-metals ratio with metallicity.
• As we demonstrate in this paper, a simple star-dust scenario is problematic also in the sense that it requires that destruction of dust in the interstellar medium (e.g., due to passage of supernova shocks) must be highly inefficient.