The importance of following the evolution of the dust in galaxies on their SEDs

We present photometric evolution of galaxies in which, in addition to the stellar component, the effects of an evolving dusty interstellar medium have been included with particular care. Starting from the work of Calura, Pipino & Matteucci (2008), in which chemical evolution models have been used to study the evolution of both the gas and dust components of the interstellar medium in spiral, elliptical and irregular galaxies, it has been possible to combine these models with a spectrophotometric stellar synthesis code that includes dust reprocessing (GRASIL) (Silva 1998) to analyse the evolution of the Spectral Energy Distributions (SED) of these galaxies. We test our models against observed SEDs both in the local universe and at high redshift. The importance of following the dust evolution is investigated by comparing our results with those obtained by adopting simple assumptions to treat this component. Possible errors from assuming a Milky Way dust composition and a dust-to-gas ratio scaling with the metallicity particularly in young galaxies, ellipticals and low metallicity galaxies are highlighted.