JINGLE - IV. Dust, H I gas, and metal scaling laws in the local Universe
Clements, D. L.; Lin, L.; Saintonge, A.; De Looze, I.; Ho, L. C.; Kennicutt, R. C.; Wilson, C. D.; Michałowski, M. J.; Li, C.; Smith, M. W. L.; Gear, W. K.; Sargent, M.; Relaño, M.; Xiao, T.; Cigan, P.; Gao, Y.; Lee, J. C.; Zhu, M.; Brinks, E.; Hwang, H. S.; Jones, A. P.; Bureau, M.; Clark, C. J. R.; De Vis, P.; Liu, T.; Lamperti, I.; Pan, H. -A.; Fanciullo, L.; Decleir, M.; Lomaeva, M.; Accurso, G.; Williams, T.
Belgium, United Kingdom, Spain, United States, Canada, France, South Korea, Taiwan, China, Ireland, Poland, Germany
Abstract
Scaling laws of dust, H I gas, and metal mass with stellar mass, specific star formation rate, and metallicity are crucial to our understanding of the build-up of galaxies through their enrichment with metals and dust. In this work, we analyse how the dust and metal content varies with specific gas mass (MH I/M⋆) across a diverse sample of 423 nearby galaxies. The observed trends are interpreted with a set of Dust and Element evolUtion modelS (DEUS) - including stellar dust production, grain growth, and dust destruction - within a Bayesian framework to enable a rigorous search of the multidimensional parameter space. We find that these scaling laws for galaxies with -1.0 ≲ log MH I/M⋆ ≲ 0 can be reproduced using closed-box models with high fractions (37-89 ${{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ ) of supernova dust surviving a reverse shock, relatively low grain growth efficiencies (ɛ = 30-40), and long dust lifetimes (1-2 Gyr). The models have present-day dust masses with similar contributions from stellar sources (50-80 ${{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ ) and grain growth (20-50 ${{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ ). Over the entire lifetime of these galaxies, the contribution from stardust (>90 ${{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ ) outweighs the fraction of dust grown in the interstellar medium (<10 ${{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ ). Our results provide an alternative for the chemical evolution models that require extremely low supernova dust production efficiencies and short grain growth time-scales to reproduce local scaling laws, and could help solving the conundrum on whether or not grains can grow efficiently in the interstellar medium.