Dust depletion of metals from local to distant galaxies I: Peculiar nucleosynthesis effects and grain growth in the ISM

Understand

Large fractions of metals are missing from the observable gas-phase in the interstellar medium (ISM) because they are incorporated into dust grains, a phenomenon called dust depletion.

• The study of dust depletion in the ISM is important to investigate the origin and evolution of metals and cosmic dust.
• Here we aim at characterizing the dust depletion of several metals from the Milky Way to distant galaxies.
• We collect ISM metal column densities from absorption-line spectroscopy in the literature, and in addition, we determine Ti and Ni column densities from a sample of 70 damped Lyman-$\alpha$ absorbers (DLAs) towards quasars, observed with UVES/VLT.