The impact of binary stars on the dust and metal evolution of galaxies

Understand

We present detailed implementations of (a) binary stellar evolution (using binary_c) and (b) dust production and destruction into the cosmological semi-analytic galaxy evolution simulation, L-Galaxies.

• This new version of L-Galaxies is compared to a version assuming only single stars and to global and spatially-resolved observational data across a range of redshifts ($z$).
• We find that binaries have a negligible impact on the stellar masses, gas masses, and star formation rates of galaxies only if the total mass ejected by massive stars is unchanged.
• This is because massive stars determine the strength of supernova (SN) feedback, which in turn regulates galaxy growth.