Description
In this talk, I will present a new view on the chemical elements in stars, dust, and gas at high redshift from the cosmological-scale galaxy evolution simulation, L-Galaxies.
L-Galaxies is currently the only cosmological simulation to simultaneously include models for detailed chemical enrichment, binary stellar evolution, and dust formation. This allows L-Galaxies to track the precise build-up of 118 chemical elements and a range of dust species back to very high redshift, enabling direct comparisons to the latest observations from JWST and providing predictions for up-coming surveys using e.g. ELT.
I will present L-Galaxies results stretching back to z~9, including (a) dust-to-gas and dust-to-metals ratios in galaxies compared to ALMA data, and (b) oxygen abundances and N/O ratios in star-forming galaxies compared to JWST data, and (c) the evolution of the total dust and metals budget in the Universe in various phases compared to recent DLA observations. Considering a combination of dust and metals in this way provides unrivalled constraining power for simulations, allowing us to pin-down the relative importance and interplay of the various processes driving chemical evolution at early times.
I will finish by outlining some up-coming plans for L-Galaxies, including direct comparisons to strong-line and electron-temperature metallicity measurements using synthetic spectra, and the development of a user-friendly version of the simulation specifically designed for use by observers.
