Interstellar Dust Production, Destruction and Effects of Dust Depletion in Galaxies

Despite the small mass fraction typically observed for the interstellar medium, dust plays a significant role as a key component of galaxies, affecting a wide range of properties. This review focuses specifically on how dust grains influence interstellar chemical abundances and on the processes that regulate the evolution of the galactic dust budget. I describe the main physical processes regulating dust evolution, including production by stars and other sources, destruction in supernova shocks and interstellar growth, and the ways in which they are included in galactic chemical evolution models. I discuss the main effects of interstellar dust on the abundances measured in various high-redshift systems that include Damped Lyman α absorbers, detected along the lines of sight of distant quasars and in the absorption spectra of Gamma Ray Burst afterglows. I discuss the measure of dust masses in galaxies and review its global budget, evaluated through the study of the evolution of the comoving dust mass density, for which I present an up-to-date compilation of data chosen from the literature. Interstellar dust growth plays a critical role in regulating the dust budget, for which I present a list of evidence both in favour of it and against. The dust budget at high redshift is one aspect that requires attention to drive significant progress in the future, along with the investigation of the properties of dust in local, low-metallicity systems. Our poor theoretical knowledge of basic aspects related to dust evolution evidences the need for a new high-sensitivity space telescope operating in the far-infrared regime, still awaited by the community since the demise of Herschel.