Dust production by supernovae at extremely low metallicity

Determine whether dust production by supernovae in extremely metal-poor, high-redshift galaxies proceeds similarly to dust production by supernovae observed locally, including the relative amounts produced and the efficiency of the process under conditions of very low metal enrichment.

Background

The paper investigates the origins of dust and dust-production mechanisms in extremely metal-poor environments by analyzing JWST infrared imaging of I Zw 18, a nearby analog of early-Universe galaxies. Supernovae are known to rapidly produce significant quantities of dust in the local Universe, but the efficiency and behavior of this production process may depend strongly on ambient metallicity.

At very low metallicities typical of early epochs, both dust creation and destruction processes (e.g., shock processing) could differ from local conditions, and the net balance remains uncertain. Clarifying how supernova-driven dust production scales with metallicity is essential to understanding the dust budget in the early Universe and to reconciling observations of large dust reservoirs at high redshift.

References

While supernovae (SNe) have been found to quickly produce dust in significant quantities locally, it is unclear how similarly this mechanic behaves at the extremely low levels of metal enrichment which characterized galaxies at high redshift.

— Imaging of I Zw 18 by JWST. I. Strategy and First Results of Dusty Stellar Populations  (2403.06980 - Hirschauer et al., 2024) in Section 1, Introduction (around paragraph beginning "Establishing a census of evolved stars...")

How, and how rapidly, dust is produced in the early Universe remains a key open question.

— Dust at cosmic dawn: unveiling the onset of dust and obscured star formation at $z\gtrsim8$  (2610.21460 - Algera et al., 15 Oct 2026) in Section 1, “Scientific context and open questions”

The first dust is thought to originate from core-collapse supernovae \citep[SNe;][]{TodiniFerrara2001}, though it remains unclear whether they alone account for the entirety of the earliest dust reservoirs.

— Dust at cosmic dawn: unveiling the onset of dust and obscured star formation at $z\gtrsim8$  (2610.21460 - Algera et al., 15 Oct 2026) in Section 1, “Scientific context and open questions”