Interstellar Grains in Elliptical Galaxies: Grain Evolution

John C. Tsai, William G. Mathews

Published 1995-02-09Version 1

We consider the lifecycle of dust introduced into the hot interstellar medium in isolated elliptical galaxies. Dust grains are ejected into galactic-scale cooling flows in large ellipticals by normal mass loss from evolving red giants. Newly introduced dust rapidly enters the hot gas environment and is sputtered away by thermal collisions with ions. Before the grains are completely sputtered away, they emit prodigious amounts of infrared radiation which may contribute to the large far infrared luminosities observed in ellipticals. In order to study the global properties of grains in ellipticals we construct a new series of King-type galactic models which are consistent with the fundamental plane, galactic mass to light ratios and other relevant observational correlations. We describe a new ``continuity'' procedure to construct simple time-dependent gas dynamic models for cooling flows. In all galaxy models, although grains can flow a considerable distance from their radius of origin before being sputtered away, the grain size distribution is accurately determined by assuming {\it in situ} sputtering, completely ignoring advection. The dominant source of grain heating is absorption of starlight; grain heating by collisions with energetic thermal electrons or X-ray absorption are negligible. However, we also show that when self-consistent grain sputtering is included the dust-to-gas ratio is reduced and radiative cooling, not electron-grain interactions dominates plasma cooling, even for the most massive ellipticals.