Confirming the Evolution of the Dust Mass Function in Galaxies over the past 5 Billion Years

Understand

The amount of evolution in the dust content of galaxies over the past five billion years of cosmic history is contested in the literature.

• Here we present a far-infrared census of dust based on a sample of 29,241 galaxies with redshifts ranging from 0 < z < 0.5 using data from the Herschel Astrophysical Terahertz Survey (H-ATLAS).
• We use the spectral energy distribution fitting tool MAGPHYS and a stacking analysis to investigate the evolution of dust mass and temperature of far-infrared-selected galaxies as a function of both luminosity and redshift.
• At low redshifts, we find that the mass-weighted and luminosity-weighted dust temperatures from the stacking analysis both exhibit a trend for brighter galaxies to have warmer dust.