The Evolving Interstellar Medium of Star-Forming Galaxies
In this talk I would like to provide a status update regarding the current and upcoming projects of my PhD. This week we have passed a milestone by submitting our work where we analyse the far-infrared properties of ∼4,700 star-forming galaxies at z <4.5, drawn from the deepest, super-deblended catalogues in the GOODS-N and COSMOS fields. We develop a novel panchromatic SED fitting algorithm, STARDUST, that models the emission from stars, AGN, and infrared emission arising from dust heated by star formation without relying on energy balance assumptions. With our code we recover robust estimates of FIR properties of our objects, and through a set of simulations we quantify how the quality of our estimates is affected by the photometric coverage and uncertainty in photoz. In particular, we focus on the dust-to-stellar mass ratio, which we find to be increasing by a factor of 10 from z= 0 to z= 2, while remaining flat at higher−z, mirroring the evolution of the gas fraction. Finally, we construct the dust mass functions (DMF) of star-forming galaxies up to z=1 by the transforming the stellar mass function to DMF through the scaling relations, that we derive in our work. Reassuringly, we find that the evolution off dust-to-stellar mass ratio, and the recovered DMFs are in good agreement both with observational data, and the theoretical predictions of the Horizon-AGN and IllustrisTNG simulations.
