A systematic metallicity study of DustPedia galaxies reveals evolution in the dust-to-metal ratios

Understand

Observations of evolution in the dust-to-metal ratio allow us to constrain the dominant dust processing mechanisms.

• In this work, we present a study of the dust-to-metal and dust-to-gas ratios in a sub-sample of ~500 DustPedia galaxies.
• Using literature and MUSE emission line fluxes, we derived gas-phase metallicities (oxygen abundances) for over 10000 individual regions and determine characteristic metallicities for each galaxy.
• We study how the relative dust, gas, and metal contents of galaxies evolve by using metallicity and gas fraction as proxies for evolutionary state.