CONVERTING FROM 3.6 AND 4.5 μm FLUXES TO STELLAR MASS

By M. Eskew, Dennis Zaritsky, S. Meidt. 2012

147 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We use high spatial resolution maps of stellar mass and infrared flux of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) to calibrate a conversion between 3.6 and 4.5 μm fluxes and stellar mass, M* = 105.65F2.853.6F−1.854.5(D/0.05)2 M☉, where fluxes are in Jy and D is the luminosity distance to the source in Mpc, and to provide an approximate empirical estimate of the fractional internal uncertainty in M* of , where N is the number of stars in the region. We find evidence that young stars and hot dust contaminate the measurements, but attempts to remove this contamination using data that are far superior to what are generally available for unresolved galaxies resulted in marginal gains in accuracy. The scatter among mass estimates for regions in the LMC is comparable to that found by previous investigators when modeling composite populations, and so we conclude that our simple conversion is as precise as possible for the data and models currently available. Our results allow for a reasonably bottom-heavy initial mass function, such as Salpeter or heavier, and moderately disfavor lighter versions such as a diet-Salpeter or Chabrier initial mass function.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Ecology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1485bdd192a9a6a34ae63ac89d9056cf638302ae

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. F. Lelli
2. J. Schombert
3. M. Galametz
4. S. McGaugh
5. M. Pawlowski
6. S. Madden
7. F. Galliano
8. L. Cortese

In Ecology

1. A. Cooray
2. F. Lelli
3. S. McGaugh
4. J. Schombert

Citations in the corpus

• One Law to Rule Them All: The Radial Acceleration Relation of Galaxies (2016, background): “They are in agreement with independent estimates from different SPS models (Meidt et al. 2014; Norris et al. 2016) and resolved stellar populations in the LMC (Eskew et al. 2012).”
• Gas-to-dust mass ratios in local galaxies over a 2 dex metallicity range (2013, methodology): “The stellar masses were obtained from the formula of Eskew et al. (2012) using the 3.6 and 4.5 µm IRAC flux densities.”
• THE SMALL SCATTER OF THE BARYONIC TULLY–FISHER RELATION (2015, background): “A small scatter of ∼0.1 dex is consistently found using different approaches: stellar population synthesis models (McGaugh & Schombert 2014; Meidt et al. 2014), resolved stellar populations (Eskew et al. 2012), and the vertical velocity dispersion of galaxy discs (Martinsson et al. 2013).”
• COLOR–MASS-TO-LIGHT-RATIO RELATIONS FOR DISK GALAXIES (2014, methodology): “Eskew et al. (2012) further discuss a [3.6]− [4.5] 7 We are aware of a variety of attempts to build stellar mass maps by making color corrections to an image.”
• An Overview of the Dwarf Galaxy Survey (2013, methodology): “…(in terms of oxygen abundances) are in column (5); MB (column [6]), galaxy size in terms ofD25 (column [7]),M , stellar mass, from the formula of Eskew et al. (2012) using 3.6 and 4.5 μm (column [8]); MHI, mass of HI (column [9]); LTIR determined from Spitzer bands (Dale & Helou 2002), unless…”
• SPARC: MASS MODELS FOR 175 DISK GALAXIES WITH SPITZER PHOTOMETRY AND ACCURATE ROTATION CURVES (2016, background): “' 0.4 − 0.5 M /L in agreement with stellar population synthesis models (McGaugh & Schombert 2014; Meidt et al. 2014), resolved stellar populations in the LMC (Eskew et al. 2012), the BTFR (McGaugh & Schombert 2015; Lelli et al. 2016), and the results presented in this paper.”