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Observations have revealed unexpectedly large amounts of dust in high‐redshift galaxies and its origin is still much debated. Valiante et al. suggested the net stellar dust production of the quasar host galaxy SDSS J1148+5251 may be sufficient to explain the large dust mass detected in this galaxy, albeit under some very special assumptions (e.g. ‘closed‐box’ evolution and a rather high gas mass). Here it is shown that since accretion of essentially pristine material may lower the efficiency of dust formation significantly, and the observationally derived dust‐to‐gas ratios for these high‐redshift galaxies are remarkably high, stellar dust production is likely insufficient. A model including metallicity‐dependent, non‐stellar dust formation (‘secondary dust’) is presented. The required contribution from this non‐stellar dust component appears too large, however. If all observational constraints are to be met, the resultant dust‐to‐metals ratio is close to unity, which means that almost all interstellar metals exist in the form of dust. This is a very unlikely situation and suggests the large dust‐to‐gas ratios at high redshifts may be due to observational uncertainties and/or incorrect calibration of conversion factors for gas and dust tracers.

Dust in the early Universe: evidence for non‐stellar dust production or observational errors?