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Session 103 - Galaxy Evolution.
Display session, Thursday, January 16
Metropolitan Ballroom,
We present a set of chemical evolutionary models to estimate the global abundance of molecular gas and dust in galaxies as a function of metallicity and cosmological epoch. This work is motivated by the recent detections of CO and dust at high redshift. Over a wide range of input parameters, we find that the total mass in gaseous metals peaks at early epochs (z\sim 1-3) when approximately half the total baryonic mass is in stars and half is in gas, (2) at its extreme, the mass of gaseous metals ranges from a few to more than ten times larger than the mass of gaseous metals at the current epoch, (3) the O/C ratios are expected to be significantly larger in chemically young systems which could enhance the O_2/CO ratio within dark molecular clouds at early cosmological epochs.
