The evolution of dust in extreme astrophysical environments

Abstract

Dust is present in almost every astrophysical environment, ranging from circumstellar shells and disks to spiral, elliptical, starburst, and active galaxies, and to pre-galactic objects such as QSO absorption-line and damped Lyα systems. Dust leaves its imprint on interstellar extinction curves, IR spectra, and the elemental depletion patterns in the ISM of galaxies. Understanding the origin and the complex evolutionary cycle of dust is therefore an important goal in astrophysics. In this contribution, we present models to describe the evolutionary history of interstellar dust in a diverse set of astrophysical environments, ranging from normal star-forming galaxies like the Milky Way to high-redshift galaxies undergoing extreme rates of star formation. In particular, we show how the chemical evolution models can explain the correlations of dust abundances with galactic metallicities, and the presence of large amounts of dust in young dusty hyperluminous infrared galaxies in which supernovae are the only source of newly-condensed dust.