KIPAC Seminar: Tracing the prevalence of cosmic dust across 13 billion years with ALMA

The ubiquity and evolution of cosmic dust within the first few billion years of the Universe remains highly contested. While significant effort has gone into identifying individual obscured sources at higher redshift (z>4) via dust continuum measurements and molecular line scans with ALMA, many questions regarding the dust content of massive galaxies at early times and dust production mechanisms persist. I will discuss ongoing efforts to uncover, characterize, and contextualize dust-obscured galaxies – many of which are rendered invisible even to JWST at wavelengths shortward of 2 microns. Additionally, I will offer a preview of some preliminary work to trace the average dust mass density across all galaxies out to z~7 using the largest 2mm blank-field observed by ALMA to date.