In the current era of high-z galaxy discovery with JWST and ALMA, our ability
to study the stellar populations and ISM conditions in a diverse range of
galaxies at Cosmic Dawn has rapidly improved. At the same time, the need to
understand the current limitations in modeling galaxy formation processes and
physical properties in order to interpret these observations is critical. Here,
we study the challenges in modeling galaxy dust temperatures, both in the
context of forward modeling galaxy spectral properties from a hydrodynamical
simulation and via backwards modeling galaxy physical properties from mock
observations of far-infrared dust emission. We find that, especially for the
most massive objects in our sample, neglecting to account for far-infrared dust
optical depth can significantly bias the dust properties derived from SED
modeling. Anisotropies in infrared emission, driven by the clumpy nature of
early star and structure formation, leads to an orientation angle bias in
quantities like infrared luminosities and apparent dust temperatures measured
from galaxy SEDs. We caution that conclusions inferred from both hydrodynamical
simulations and observations alike are susceptible to unique and nuanced
uncertainties that can limit the usefulness of current high-z dust
measurements.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figures. Submitted to ApJ. Comments welcome