The evolution of galaxy dust scaling relations in the COLIBRE simulations

arXiv:2607.26058 · astro-ph.GA · Submitted 2026-07-28 · Read on arXiv

Aswin P. Vijayan, James W. Trayford, Joop Schaye, Sylvia Ploeckinger, Andrea Gebek, Nick Andreadis, Maarten Baes, Alejandro Benítez-Llambay, Evgenii Chaikin, Carlos S. Frenk, Filip Huško, Robert J. McGibbon, Alexander J. Richings, Matthieu Schaller

astro-ph.GA

Submitted: 2026-07-28

Comments: 24 pages and 13 figures in main text. Submitted to MNRAS. COLIBRE simulation project website: https://colibre.strw.leidenuniv.nl

Project page: https://colibre.strw.leidenuniv.nl

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: We present dust scaling relations across cosmic time (0 z 15) for galaxies in the COLIBRE cosmological simulations.

Terminology

Abstract

We present dust scaling relations across cosmic time (0 z 15) for galaxies in the COLIBRE cosmological simulations. COLIBRE self-consistently tracks dust production, growth, destruction, and grain size evolution within a multiphase interstellar medium. Using volumes up to (400, cMpc) cubed at three mass resolutions (10 5-10 7 M), we predict the dust mass function, cosmic dust mass density, and key dust scaling relations (dust-to-gas ratio, dust-to-metal ratio, grain species fractions, and grain sizes) as functions of galaxy metallicity, stellar mass, and dust mass. The model broadly reproduces most observed relations across cosmic time, matching closest at the highest resolution. We find that silicates dominate the dust mass (70%) at all epochs, and while large grains dominate in the early Universe (z 5), their mass fraction declines to become comparable to small grains by z=0. At z < 1, the simulated dust mass functions align well with observations, but the cosmic dust mass density is systematically high by 0.3 dex, while in agreement with observations at higher redshifts. Additionally, the simulations underpredict the extreme dust masses of bright sub-millimeter galaxies at z 2. We demonstrate that scaling relations are sensitive to numerical resolution only in the low-redshift, low-mass regime; while their normalisation is influenced by gas-phase selection. These findings highlight both the predictive power and resolution-dependent limits of cosmological dust models, providing essential insights to refine ISM physics.

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