Dust evolution in galaxy cluster simulations

Abstract

We implement a state-of-the-art treatment of the processes affecting the production and Interstellar Medium (ISM) evolution of carbonaceous and silicate dust grains within SPH simulations. We trace the dust grain size distribution by means of a two-size approximation. We test our method on zoom-in simulations of four massive (M200 ≥ 3 × 1014M⊙) galaxy clusters. We predict that during the early stages of assembly of the cluster at z ≳ 3, where the star formation activity is at its maximum in our simulations, the proto-cluster regions are rich in dusty gas. Compared to the case in which only dust production in stellar ejecta is active, if we include processes occurring in the cold ISM, the dust content is enhanced by a factor 2-3. However, the dust properties in this stage turn out to be significantly different from those observationally derived for the average Milky Way dust, and commonly adopted in calculations of dust reprocessing.We show that these differences may have a strong impact on the predicted spectral energy distributions. At low redshift in star-forming regions our model reproduces reasonably well the trend of dust abundances over metallicity as observed in local galaxies. However we underproduce by a factor of 2-3 the total dust content of clusters estimated observationally at low redshift, z ≲ 0.5 using IRAS, Planck, and Herschel satellites data. This discrepancy does not subsist by assuming a lower sputtering efficiency, which erodes dust grains in the hot intracluster medium.