Dust depletion of of metals from local to distant galaxies II: Cosmic dust-to-metal ratio and dust composition

Understand

The evolution of the cosmic dust content and the cycle between metals and dust in the interstellar medium (ISM) play a fundamental role in galaxy evolution.

• The chemical enrichment of the Universe can be traced through the evolution of the dust-to-metals ratio (DTM) and the dust-to-gas ratio (DTG) with metallicity.
• We use a novel method to determine mass estimates of the DTM, DTG and dust composition based on our previous measurements of the depletion of metals in different environments (the Milky Way, the Magellanic Clouds, and damped Lyman-$\alpha$ absorbers, DLAs, toward quasars and towards gamma-ray bursts, GRBs), which were calculated from the relative abundances of metals in the ISM through absorption-line spectroscopy column densities observed mainly from VLT/UVES and X-shooter, and HST/STIS.
• We derive the dust extinction from the estimated dust depletion ($A_{V, \rm depl}$) and compare with the $A_{V}$ from extinction.