Dust Formation in Milky Way-like Galaxies

Understand

We introduce a dust model for cosmological simulations implemented in the moving-mesh code AREPO and present a suite of cosmological hydrodynamical zoom-in simulations to study dust formation within galactic haloes.

• Our model accounts for the stellar production of dust, accretion of gas-phase metals onto existing grains, destruction of dust through local supernova activity, and dust driven by winds from star-forming regions.
• We find that accurate stellar and active galactic nuclei feedback is needed to reproduce the observed dust-metallicity relation and that dust growth largely dominates dust destruction.
• Our simulations predict a dust content of the interstellar medium which is consistent with observed scaling relations at $z = 0$, including scalings between dust-to-gas ratio and metallicity, dust mass and gas mass, dust-to-gas ratio and stellar mass, and dust-to-stellar mass ratio and gas fraction.