Near-Infrared and Star-forming Properties of Local Luminous Infrared Galaxies

By A. Alonso-Herrero, G. Rieke, M. Rieke, L. Colina, P. Pérez-González, S. Ryder. 2006

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We use Hubble Space Telescope (HST) NICMOS continuum and Paα observations to study the near-infrared and star formation properties of a representative sample of 30 local (d ~ 35-75 Mpc) luminous infrared galaxies (LIRGs, infrared [8-1000 μm] luminosities of log LIR = 11-11.9 L☉). The data provide spatial resolutions of 25-50 pc and cover the central ~3.3-7.1 kpc regions of these galaxies. About half of the LIRGs show compact (~1-2 kpc) Paα emission with a high surface brightness in the form of nuclear emission, rings, and minispirals. The rest of the sample show Paα emission along the disk and the spiral arms extending over scales of 3-7 kpc and larger. About half of the sample contains H II regions with Hα luminosities significantly higher than those observed in normal galaxies. There is a linear empirical relationship between the mid-IR 24 μm and hydrogen recombination (extinction-corrected Paα) luminosity for these LIRGs, and the H II regions in the central part of M51. This relation holds over more than four decades in luminosity, suggesting that the mid-IR emission is a good tracer of the star formation rate (SFR). Analogous to the widely used relation between the SFR and total IR luminosity of R. Kennicutt, we derive an empirical calibration of the SFR in terms of the monochromatic 24 μm luminosity that can be used for luminous, dusty galaxies.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/12264637df76818188c59f54946df730284a7f65

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Citations in the corpus

A CHANDRA PERSPECTIVE ON GALAXY-WIDE X-RAY BINARY EMISSION AND ITS CORRELATION WITH STAR FORMATION RATE AND STELLAR MASS: NEW RESULTS FROM LUMINOUS INFRARED GALAXIES (2010, background): “Studies of LIRGs/ULIRGs have found that in these objects the powerful star-formation activity occurs in compact regions that are surrounded by large columns of gas and dust (e.g., Soifer et al. 2000; Alonso-Herrero et al. 2006b; Siebenmorgen et al. 2008).”
Star Formation in NGC 5194 (M51a). II. The Spatially Resolved Star Formation Law (2007, background): “Subsequent work has shown that this trend extends to other highly-extincted HII regions in other galaxies (Wu et al. 2005; Alonso-Herrero et al. 2006; Calzetti et al. 2007).”
ESTIMATING THE STAR FORMATION RATE AT 1 kpc SCALES IN NEARBY GALAXIES (2012, background): “…of nearby galaxies have revealed a strong empirical correlation between 24µm emission and sites of active star formation (e.g., Calzetti et al. 2005; Alonso-Herrero et al. 2006; Pérez-González et al. 2006; Prescott et al. 2007) and it has been used extensively to investigate the correlations…”
DETERMINING STAR FORMATION RATES FOR INFRARED GALAXIES (2008, methodology): “(7) Star Forming Galaxy Templates 5 As indicated by Alonso-Herrero et al. (2006), Kennicutt et al. (2007), and Calzetti et al. (2007), it is possible that the calibration applies poorly to whole galaxies because of diffuse extended Paα emission that is not captured by the NICMOS imaging used to…”
THE IMPACT OF INTERACTIONS, BARS, BULGES, AND ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI ON STAR FORMATION EFFICIENCY IN LOCAL MASSIVE GALAXIES (2012, background): “…there is no one-to-one correlation between a high infrared luminosity (LFIR > 10 11L⊙) and the need for a low value of αCO, nor between morphological signs of merging and enhanced star formation activity (e.g. Bushouse et al. 1988; Alonso-Herrero et al. 2006; Dasyra et al. 2006; Cox et al. 2008).”
DUST-CORRECTED STAR FORMATION RATES OF GALAXIES. I. COMBINATIONS OF Hα AND INFRARED TRACERS (2009, methodology): “Previously several groups have investigated the correlation between 24 μm IR emission and attenuation-corrected Hα and Paα emission, and used them to calibrate the 24 μm emission as a SFR measure (Wu et al. 2005; Alonso-Herrero et al. 2006; Relaño et al. 2007; C07).”
The Stellar Mass Assembly of Galaxies from z = 0 to z = 4: Analysis of a Sample Selected in the Rest-Frame Near-Infrared with Spitzer (2007, methodology): “Another estimation of the SFR can be obtained from the rest-frame monochromatic luminosity at 24 µm applying the equation given in Alonso-Herrero et al. (2006).”
GALAXY AND MASS ASSEMBLY (GAMA): MID-INFRARED PROPERTIES AND EMPIRICAL RELATIONS FROM WISE (2014, background): “Numerous studies have investigated its stability as a measure of SFR (see, e.g., Alonso-Herrero et al. 2006; Calzetti et al. 2007; Rieke et al. 2009) and we are able to transfer this understanding to WISE and its 22 μm band.”
Star-formation laws in luminous infrared galaxies. New observational constraints on models (2011, methodology): “However LIRGs/ULIRGs do not behave as a monolithic family in this respect: some LIRGs, especially in the range LIR ≤1011.4L⊙ can have spread-out star formation (Hattori et al. 2004; Alonso-Herrero et al. 2006; Rodrı́guez-Zahur´ın et al. 2011).”
CALIBRATING EXTINCTION-FREE STAR FORMATION RATE DIAGNOSTICS WITH 33 GHz FREE–FREE EMISSION IN NGC 6946 (2011, background): “Thus, we also include a monochromatic 24µm based SFR diagnostic, for which there are a number of calibrations in the literature (e.g., Wu et al. 2005; Pérez-González et al. 2006; Alonso-Herrero et al. 2006; Calzetti et al. 2007; Relaño et al. 2007; Zhu et al. 2008; Rieke et al. 2009).”
The applicability of far-infrared fine-structure lines as star formation rate tracers over wide ranges of metallicities and galaxy types (2014, background): “…rate tracers on both local scales (Calzetti et al. 2007; Leroy et al. 2008) and global scales (e.g., Calzetti et al. 2005, 2007; Wu et al. 2005; Alonso-Herrero et al. 2006; Pérez-González et al. 2006; Zhu et al. 2008; Kennicutt et al. 2009; Rieke et al. 2009; Hao et al. 2011) and directly…”
The Behavior of the Aromatic Features in M101 H II Regions: Evidence for Dust Processing (2008, methodology): “This gives a SFR of 1.8 and 1.1 M⊙ year −1 using the calibrations of Alonso-Herrero et al. (2006) or Calzetti et al. (2007), respectively.”