Confirming the evolution of the dust mass function in galaxies over the past 5 billion years

ABSTRACT The amount of evolution in the dust content of galaxies over the past 5 billion years of cosmic history is contested in the literature. Here, we present a far-infrared (FIR) census of dust based on a sample of 29 241 galaxies with redshifts ranging from $0 \lt z \lt 0.5$ using data from the Herschel Astrophysical Terahertz Large Area Survey ($H$-ATLAS). We use the spectral energy distribution fitting tool magphys and a stacking analysis to investigate the evolution of dust mass and temperature of FIR-selected galaxies as a function of both luminosity and redshift. At low redshifts, we find that the mass-weighted and luminosity-weighted dust temperatures from the stacking analysis both exhibit a trend for brighter galaxies to have warmer dust. In higher redshift bins, we see some evolution in both mass-weighted and luminosity-weighted dust temperatures with redshift, but the effect is strongest for luminosity-weighted temperature. The measure of dust content in galaxies at $z\lt 0.1$ (the dust mass function) has a different shape to that derived using optically selected galaxies from the same region of sky. We revise the local dust mass density ($z\lt 0.1$) to $\rho _{\rm d} =(1.37\pm 0.08)\times 10^5 {\rm \, {\rm M}_{\odot }\, Mpc^{-3}}\, h_{70}^{-1}$; corresponding to an overall fraction of baryons (by mass) stored in dust of $f_{\rm mb} {(\rm dust)} = (2.22\pm 0.13) \times 10^{-5}$. We confirm evolution in both the luminosity density and dust mass density over the past few billion years ($\rho _{\rm d} \propto (1+z)^{2.6 \pm 0.6}$), with a flatter evolution than observed in previous FIR-selected studies. We attribute the evolution in $\rho _{\rm L}$ and $\rho _{\rm m}$ to an evolution in the dust mass.