Recovering the dust mass budget with PRIMA

Achieving a complete picture of galaxy evolution is a primary goal of extragalactic astrophysics. To accomplish this ambitious task, a wealth of multiwavelength surveys have been devoted to assessing the cosmic evolution of the cold gas and of the stellar mass across cosmic time. In this cosmic census, one elusive component is represented by interstellar dust. In this work, we exploit the infrared mission PRobe far-Infrared Mission for Astrophysics (PRIMA) (covering wavelengths from 24 to 235 μm) to perform a deep survey (1000 h on 1 deg2) aimed at estimating the still poorly known dust mass function (DMF) at z∼0.5−5. We consider the spectrophotometric realization of the SPRITZ simulation, and we compute the dust masses using single-temperature modified gray body functions. We show how PRIMA alone, thanks to its unprecedented sensitivities, will constrain the DMF at z<1.5, in terms of mass and faint-end slope. At z>1.5, we stress the key synergy with current or future submillimeter facilities, such as the JCMT/SCUBA-2, AtLAST, LMT, and ALMA telescopes, which will allow us to probe the Rayleigh–Jeans regime of PRIMA selected galaxies. Finally, PRIMA, thanks to its large photometric coverage, will be able for the first time to constrain strictly the warm dust properties of a two-component dust model.