Dust Abundance Variations in the Magellanic Clouds: Probing the
  Lifecycle of Metals with All-Sky Surveys
  Observations and modeling suggest that the dust abundance (gas-to-dust ratio,
G/D) depends on (surface) density. The variations of the G/D provide
constraints on the timescales for the different processes involved in the
lifecycle of metals in galaxies. Recent G/D measurements based on Herschel data
suggest a factor 5---10 decrease in the dust abundance between the dense and
diffuse interstellar medium (ISM) in the Magellanic Clouds. However, the
relative nature of the Herschel measurements precludes definitive conclusions
on the magnitude of those variations. We investigate the variations of the dust
abundance in the LMC and SMC using all-sky far-infrared surveys, which do not
suffer from the limitations of Herschel on their zero-point calibration. We
stack the dust spectral energy distribution (SED) at 100, 350, 550, and 850
microns from IRAS and Planck in intervals of gas surface density, model the
stacked SEDs to derive the dust surface density, and constrain the relation
between G/D and gas surface density in the range 10---100 \Msu pc$^{-2}$ on
$\sim$ 80 pc scales. We find that G/D decreases by factors of 3 (from 1500 to
500) in the LMC and 7 (from 1.5$\times 10^4$ to 2000) in the SMC between the
diffuse and dense ISM. The surface density dependence of G/D is consistent with
elemental depletions and with simple modeling of the accretion of gas-phase
metals onto dust grains. This result has important implications for the
sub-grid modeling of galaxy evolution, and for the calibration of dust-based
gas mass estimates, both locally and at high-redshift.
