Disentangling galaxy and dust evolution mechanisms through chemical abundances

It remains an unanswered question what dictates the amount of dust in the interstellar medium. Asymptotic giant branch stars and supernovae are the stellar sources both in terms of production through dredge up or supernova explosions, but they also destroy dust during the star-formation and with supernova shockwaves. This lead to theories of efficient metal accretion in the interstellar medium onto dust grains. This implies that amount of dust in a galaxy is directly linked to the star formation history and how much material can interact with it. We can potentially disentangle the evolution effects by adding information on the chemical abundances of several elements. Oxygen primarily forms in high-mass stars, whereas nitrogen can form in low and intermediate-mass stars. Oxygen is also commonly suggested to accrete more efficiently onto dust grains. The goal of the talk is to combine our knowledge of metal and dust production to answer what drives the dust content in galaxies. The talk will showcase spatially resolved maps of the stellar mass, gas mass, and dust mass surface density for local spiral galaxies NGC628 (M74), NGC5457 (M101), NGC598 (M33), and NGC300 to motivate the use of chemical and dust evolution models for disentangling the different evolution mechanisms within these galaxies by explaining the oxygen abundance and the nitrogen-to-oxygen abundance ratio explains the differences in the dust-to-stellar mass ratio and the dust-to-metal ratio.