Dust grain size evolution in local galaxies: a comparison between observations and simulations

Understand

The evolution of the dust grain size distribution has been studied in recent years with great detail in cosmological hydrodynamical simulations taking into account all the channels under which dust evolves in the interstellar medium.

• We present a systematic analysis of the observed spectral energy distribution of a large sample of galaxies in the local universe in order to derive not only the total dust masses but also the relative mass fraction between small and large dust grains (DS/DL).
• Simulations reproduce fairly well the observations except for the high stellar mass regime where dust masses tend to be overestimated.
• We find that ~45% of galaxies exhibit DS/DL consistent with the expectations of simulations, while there is a sub-sample of massive galaxies presenting high DS/DL (log(DS/DL)~-0.5), and deviating from the prediction in simulations.