Late-time cosmic evolution of dust: solving the puzzle

Understand

Dust is an essential ingredient of galaxies, determining the physical and chemical conditions in the interstellar medium.

• Several complementary observational evidences indicate that the cosmic dust mass density significantly drops from redshift $z=1$ to $z=0$.
• Clearly, and for the first time during cosmic evolution, dust must be destroyed more rapidly than it is formed.
• By considering the dust production/destruction processes acting in this cosmic time lapse, we find that the drop can be explained if dust is mainly destroyed by astration (49\% contribution in the fiducial case) and supernova shocks within galaxies (42\%).