Predicting dust extinction from the stellar mass of a galaxy

By T. Garn, P. Best. 2010

238 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigate how the typical dust extinction of Hα luminosity from a star-forming galaxy depends upon star formation rate (SFR), metallicity and stellar mass independently, using a sample of ~90 000 galaxies from Data Release 7 of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). We measure extinctions directly from the Balmer decrement of each source, and while higher values of extinction are associated with an increase in any of the three parameters, we demonstrate that the fundamental property that governs extinction is stellar mass. After this mass-dependent relationship is removed, there is very little systematic dependence of the residual extinctions with either SFR or metallicity, and no significant improvement is obtained from a more general parametrization. In contrast to this, if either an SFR-dependent or a metallicity-dependent extinction relationship is applied, the residual extinctions show significant trends that correlate with the other parameters. Using the SDSS data, we present a relationship to predict the median dust extinction of a sample of galaxies from its stellar mass, which has a scatter of ~0.3 mag. The relationship was calibrated for Hα emission, but can be more generally applied to radiation emitted at other wavelengths. These results have important applications for studies of high-redshift galaxies, where individual extinction measurements are hard to obtain but stellar mass estimates can be relatively easily estimated from long-wavelength data.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1602d2edf4b2b18665cac300bc541baaf1616589

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. P. V. van Dokkum
2. C. Conroy
3. D. M. Alexander
4. M. Franx
5. L. Hernquist
6. P. Hopkins
7. P. Capak
8. I. Labbé

In Instrumentation

1. P. V. van Dokkum
2. C. Conroy
3. M. Franx
4. P. Capak
5. D. M. Alexander
6. I. Labbé
7. A. Koekemoer
8. A. Renzini

Citations in the corpus

• GOODS-Herschel: dust attenuation properties of UV selected high redshift galaxies (2012, background): “Dust attenuation is also found to be correlated with the stellar mass as already reported from the local universe up to high redshifts (Martin et al., 2007; Iglesias-Pàramo et al., 2007; Buat et al., 2009; Pannella et al., 2009; Garn & Best, 2010; Finkelstein et al., 2011; Sawicki, 2012).”
• CONSTRAINING THE LOW-MASS SLOPE OF THE STAR FORMATION SEQUENCE AT 0.5 < z < 2.5 (2014, methodology): “The dotted black line in Figure 5 is derived from the Balmer decrement measurements from the SDSS sample presented in Garn & Best (2010).”
• PRIMUS: CONSTRAINTS ON STAR FORMATION QUENCHING AND GALAXY MERGING, AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE STELLAR MASS FUNCTION FROM z = 0–1 (2013, background): “Moreover, the differences are likely to be stellar mass-dependent because the level of star formation activity and amount of dust attenuation vary systematically with stellar mass (Brinchmann et al. 2004; Elbaz et al. 2007; Garn & Best 2010).”
• GOODS-HERSCHEL: STAR FORMATION, DUST ATTENUATION, AND THE FIR–RADIO CORRELATION ON THE MAIN SEQUENCE OF STAR-FORMING GALAXIES UP TO z ≃ 4 (2014, methodology): “The latter relation was first established in the local Universe by Garn & Best (2010) and more recently confirmed by Zahid et al. (2013b) by using the observed Balmer decrement, i.e.Hα/Hβ, measured in SDSS spectra as previously done in Brinchmann et al. (2004).”
• Star formation at z=1.47 from HiZELS: an Hα+[O ii] double-blind study* (2011, methodology): “Emission line fluxes are aperture corrected following a similar procedure as in Garn & Best (2010) – i.e. by using the ratio between the fibre estimated mass and the total mass of each galaxy.”
• A HIGHLY CONSISTENT FRAMEWORK FOR THE EVOLUTION OF THE STAR-FORMING “MAIN SEQUENCE” FROM z ∼ 0–6 (2014, methodology): “This could be improved further by combining information on correlations among other physical parameters, such as the mass – dust attenuation relation from Garn & Best (2010), IRX(z) results from R12a and B12, and the form of the MS presented here.”
• THE FMOS-COSMOS SURVEY OF STAR-FORMING GALAXIES AT z ∼ 1.6. I. Hα-BASED STAR FORMATION RATES AND DUST EXTINCTION (2013, methodology): “Star-forming galaxies atz ∼ 0.1 from SDSS DR9 are indicated with stellar masses provided by MPA-JHU and the best-fit relation of Garn & Best (2010).”
• A comprehensive classification of galaxies in the SDSS: How to tell true from fake AGN? (2010, background): “The underlying reason for a smaller extinction in SF than the rest of galaxies lies in their lower masses (seeStasińska et al. 2004; Garn & Best 2010).”
• A POPULATION OF MASSIVE, LUMINOUS GALAXIES HOSTING HEAVILY DUST-OBSCURED GAMMA-RAY BURSTS: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE USE OF GRBs AS TRACERS OF COSMIC STAR FORMATION (2013, background): “…correlate with the average attenuation of a star-forming galaxy within field-selected samples (e.g., Brinchmann et al. 2004; Pannella et al. 2009; Garn & Best 2010), although there is significant scatter in the relation and these variables also correlate with many other properties, such as the…”
• On the evolution and environmental dependence of the star formation rate versus stellar mass relation since z ∼ 2 (2013, methodology): “M∗ correlation established for local galaxies (see§ 2.3), which has a large intrinsic scatter (Garn & Best 2010).”
• DUST EXTINCTION FROM BALMER DECREMENTS OF STAR-FORMING GALAXIES AT 0.75 ⩽ z ⩽ 1.5 WITH HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE/WIDE-FIELD-CAMERA 3 SPECTROSCOPY FROM THE WFC3 INFRARED SPECTROSCOPIC PARALLEL SURVEY (2012, methodology): “The dashed-blue line shows the relationship between the Balmer decrement and galaxy stellar mass calculated from the analysis of a different SDSS sample by Garn & Best (2010).”