The Rise and Fall of Dust in the Universe

Understand

We estimate how the mean density of dust in the universe varies with redshift, using submillimetre continuum observations and a method designed to minimise the effect of dust temperature.

• We have used the Herschel-ATLAS to show that the median temperature of dust in galaxies is ~22 K and does not vary significantly with redshift out to z=1.
• With this as our estimate of the mass-weighted dust temperature, we have used an 850-micron survey of the COSMOS field to estimate the mean density of dust in 10 redshift bins over the range 0 < z < 5.5.
• We find that the mean density of dust increased by a factor of ~10 from z=5 to z=2, declined slightly to z=1, and then steeply to the present day.