The dust enrichment of early galaxies in the JWST and ALMA era

Abstract

Recent observations with the James Webb Space Telescope are yielding tantalizing hints of an early population of massive, bright galaxies at $z > 10$, with Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) observations indicating significant dust masses as early as $z\sim 7$. To understand the implications of these observations, we use the DELPHI semi-analytic model that jointly tracks the assembly of dark matter halos and their baryons, including the key processes of dust enrichment. Our model employs only two redshift- and mass-independent free parameters (the maximum star-formation efficiency and the fraction of supernova energy that couples to gas) that are tuned against all available galaxy data at $z \sim 5-9$ before it is used to make predictions up to $z \sim 20$. Our key results are: (i) the model under-predicts the observed ultraviolet luminosity function (UV LF) at $z > 12$; observations at $z>16$ lie close to, or even above, a "maximal" model where all available gas is turned into stars; (ii) UV selection would miss 34\% of the star formation rate density at $z \sim 5$, decreasing to 17\% by $z \sim 10$ for bright galaxies with $\rm{M_{UV}} < -19$; (iii) the dust mass ($M_d$) evolves with the stellar mass ($M_*$) and redshift as $\log(M_d) = 1.194\log(M_*) + 0.0975z - 5.433$; (iv) the dust temperature increases with stellar mass, ranging between $30-33$ K for $M_* \sim 10^{9-11}M_\odot$ galaxies at $z \sim 7$. Finally, we predict the far infrared LF at $z \sim 5-20$, testable with ALMA observations, and caution that spectroscopic redshifts and dust masses must be pinned down before invoking unphysical extrema in galaxy formation models.