Papers › No Redshift Evolution of Dust Temperatures from 0 < z < 2
No Redshift Evolution of Dust Temperatures from 0 < z < 2
Patrick M. Drew, Caitlin M. Casey
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Some recent literature has claimed there to be an evolution in galaxies' dust temperatures towards warmer (or colder) spectral energy distributions (SEDs) between low and high redshift. These conclusions are driven by both theoretical models and empirical measurement. Such claims sometimes contradict one another and are prone to biases in samples or SED fitting techniques. What has made direct comparisons difficult is that there is no uniform approach to fitting galaxies' infrared/millimeter SEDs. Here we aim to standardize the measurement of galaxies' dust temperatures with a python-based SED fitting procedure, MCIRSED. We draw on reference datasets observed by IRAS, Herschel, and Scuba-2 to test for redshift evolution out to z∼2. We anchor our work to the L_(IR)-λₚₑₐₖ plane, where there is an empirically observed anti-correlation between IR luminosity and rest-frame peak wavelength (an observational proxy for luminosity-weighted dust temperature) such that λₚₑₐₖ=λₜ(L_(IR)/Lₜ)^η where η=-0.09±0.01, Lₜ=10¹² L_⊙, and λₜ=92±2μm. We find no evidence for redshift evolution of galaxies' temperatures, or λₚₑₐₖ, at fixed L_(IR) from 0<z<2 with >99.99% confidence. Our finding does not preclude evolution in dust temperatures at fixed stellar mass, which is expected from a non-evolving L_(IR)-λₚₑₐₖ relation and a strongly evolving SFR-M_⋆ relation. The breadth of dust temperatures at a given L_(IR) is likely driven by variation in galaxies' dust geometries and sizes and does not evolve. Testing for L_(IR)-λₚₑₐₖ evolution toward higher redshift (z∼5-6) requires better sampling of galaxies' dust SEDs near their peaks (observed ∼200-600μm) with $<$1 mJy sensitivity. This poses a significant challenge to current instrumentation.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections