Metallicity Effects on Dust Properties in Starbursting Galaxies

By C. Engelbracht, G. Rieke, Karl D. Gordon, J. D. T. Smith, M. Werner, John Moustakas, C. Willmer, L. Vanzi. 2008

276 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present infrared observations of 66 starburst galaxies over the full range of oxygen abundances observed in local star-forming galaxies, from 12 + log (O/H) = 7.1 to 8.9. The data include imaging and spectroscopy from the Spitzer Space Telescope, supplemented by ground-based near-infrared imaging. We confirm a strong correlation of aromatic emission with metallicity, with a threshold at 12 + log (O/H) ∼ 8. We show that the far-infrared color temperature of the large dust grains increases toward lower metallicity, peaking at a metallicity of 8 before turning over. We compute dust masses and compare them to H I masses from the literature to derive the ratio of atomic gas to dust, which increases by nearly 3 orders of magnitude between solar metallicity and a metallicity of 8, below which it flattens out. The abrupt change in aromatic emission at mid-infrared wavelengths thus appears to be reflected in the far-infrared properties, indicating that metallicity changes affect the composition of the full range of dust grain sizes that dominate the infrared emission. Although the great majority of galaxies show similar patterns of behavior as described above, there are three exceptions, SBS 0335–052E, Haro 11, and SHOC 391. Their infrared SEDs are dominated energetically by the mid-IR near 24 μm rather than by the 60-200 μm region. In addition, they have very weak near-infrared outputs and their SEDs are dominated by emission by dust at wavelengths as short as 1.8 μm. The latter behavior indicates that the dominant star-forming episodes in them are extremely young. The component of the ISM responsible for the usual far-infrared emission appears to be either missing or inefficiently heated in these three galaxies.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

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EXTENDING THE NEARBY GALAXY HERITAGE WITH WISE: FIRST RESULTS FROM THE WISE ENHANCED RESOLUTION GALAXY ATLAS (2012, background): “…strength of the PAH emission bands depends on the metallicity, column density of gas and ionizing radiation field from the young stellar population (Engelbracht et al 2008; Draine 2011), but the 11.3 µm PAH can also be excited by spatially-diffuse, evolved (∼Gyr) stellar population (Calzetti 2011).”
OPTICAL SPECTROSCOPY AND NEBULAR OXYGEN ABUNDANCES OF THE SPITZER/SINGS GALAXIES (2010, background): “…(PAH) emission in the mid-IR of galaxies more metal-poor than a threshold gas-phase oxygen abundance of 12 + log (O/H) ≈ 8.1 (e.g., Madden 2000; Engelbracht et al. 2005, 2008), which may be due, in part, to a paucity of metals from which to form these complex molecules (e.g., Draine et al.…”
Gas-to-dust mass ratios in local galaxies over a 2 dex metallicity range (2013, background): “…show that the G/D of some low-metallicity dwarf galaxies deviate from this reference trend, with a higher G/D than expected for their metallicity (Lisenfeld & Ferrara 1998; Galliano et al. 2003, 2005, 2008, 2011; Hunt et al. 2005; Bernard et al. 2008; Engelbracht et al. 2008; Galametz et al. 2011).”
SURVEYING THE AGENTS OF GALAXY EVOLUTION IN THE TIDALLY STRIPPED, LOW METALLICITY SMALL MAGELLANIC CLOUD (SAGE-SMC). I. OVERVIEW (2011, methodology): “Young Stellar Objects SMC star formation historically has been traced via HII regions, but with the advent of Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer systematic studies of YSOs are possible (Chu et al. 2005; Nota et al. 2006).”
The dust content of galaxies from z = 0 to z = 9 (2016, background): “…of metallicity or galaxy stellar mass (Issa, MacLaren & Wolfendale 1990; Lisenfeld & Ferrara 1998; Hirashita, Tajiri & Kamaya 2002; James et al. 2002; Hunt, Bianchi & Maiolino 2005; Draine et al. 2007; Engelbracht et al. 2008; Galametz et al. 2011; Magrini et al. 2011; Rémy-Ruyer et al. 2014a).”
DUST-CORRECTED STAR FORMATION RATES OF GALAXIES. I. COMBINATIONS OF Hα AND INFRARED TRACERS (2009, methodology): “…longer wavelength tracers such as the 24 μm emission, with systematic dependences of the emissivity on metal abundance, and local radiation field strength and hardness (e.g., Madden 2000; Peeters et al. 2004; Engelbracht et al. 2005, 2008; Dale et al. 2005; Wu et al. 2006; Smith et al. 2007; C07).”
ESCAPE FRACTION OF IONIZING PHOTONS DURING REIONIZATION: EFFECTS DUE TO SUPERNOVA FEEDBACK AND RUNAWAY OB STARS (2014, background): “…simulated galaxies are very metal-poor (0.0 2− 0.05Z⊙) and galaxies with lower metallicity have a progressively lower amount of dust (Lisenfeld & Ferrara 1998; Engelbracht et al. 2008; Galametz et al. 2011; Fisher et al. 2013), it is unlikely that dust decreases the escape fraction substantially.”
The Behavior of the Aromatic Features in M101 H II Regions: Evidence for Dust Processing (2008, methodology): “Only the large range in both II and metallicity probed in this work and the companion work of Engelbracht et al. (2008) allowed for the true nature of the aromatic feature variations to be revealed.”
DETERMINING STAR FORMATION RATES FOR INFRARED GALAXIES (2008, methodology): “We put both data sets on a common calibration basis: 1.) we took the bandpass corrections out of the photometry reported by Engelbracht et al. (2008); and 2.) we corrected all pre-2007 photometry to the current MIPS calibration (Engelbracht et al. 2007).”
The Herschel Dwarf Galaxy Survey - I. Properties of the low-metallicity ISM from PACS spectroscopy (2015, methodology): “For the compact sample of the DGS, we consider SED integrated values from Rémy-Ruyer et al. (in prep.) for LTIR and observed IRAS fluxes from Engelbracht et al. (2008) for F60/F100 (when available).”
HERSCHEL FAR-INFRARED AND SUBMILLIMETER PHOTOMETRY FOR THE KINGFISH SAMPLE OF NEARBY GALAXIES (2011, background): “A similar characteristic oxygen abundance has been noted in other studies of the PAH abundance in galaxies (e.g., Hunt et al. 2005; Draine et al. 2007; Smith et al. 2007; Engelbracht et al. 2008).”
Probing the dust properties of galaxies up to submillimetre wavelengths. II. Dust-to-gas mass ratio trends with metallicity and the submm excess in dwarf galaxies (2011, methodology): “…knowledge of the dust properties of the ISM such as the distribution of the different dust components (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), silicate, graphite) and how they are affected by metallicity (Galliano et al. 2008; Engelbracht et al. 2008; Bendo et al. 2008; Muñoz-Mateos et al. 2009).”
THE EMISSION BY DUST AND STARS OF NEARBY GALAXIES IN THE HERSCHEL KINGFISH SURVEY (2011, background): “…to demarcate “dust” and “stellar” emission in the SEDs, the simplest approach would be to impose a strict wavelength cut at 5 µm, which is motivated by the fact that most stellar emission occurs at shorter wavelengths and dust mostly emits at longer wavelengths (e.g., Engelbracht et al. 2008).”
An Overview of the Dwarf Galaxy Survey (2013, background): “…the importance of mid-infrared (MIR) to FIR observations in studying the ionized and photodissociated gas emission measures and the unusual dust properties in the low luminosity, lowmetallicity galaxies (e.g., Engelbracht et al. 2005;Madden et al. 2006;Wu et al. 2006; Engelbracht et al. 2008).”
Dust spectral energy distributions of nearby galaxies: an insight from the Herschel Reference Survey (2014, background): “This was demonstrated in Galliano et al. (2003), Boselli et al. (2004), Madden et al. (2006), Engelbracht et al. (2008) and Gordon et al. (2008) for galaxies with lower metallicities.”
THE SPITZER LOCAL VOLUME LEGACY: SURVEY DESCRIPTION AND INFRARED PHOTOMETRY (2009, unknown): “Panel e of Figure 11 – 17 – shows a plot similar to that in Panel b but with the stellar emission removed using the expression presented in Helou et al. (2004): νfν(8.0µm)dust = νfν(8.0µm) − η8∗νfν(3.6µm) (8) where η8∗ = 0.232× 3.6/8.0 (see also Engelbracht et al. 2008 for a similar scale factor).”
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A MOLECULAR STAR FORMATION LAW IN THE ATOMIC-GAS-DOMINATED REGIME IN NEARBY GALAXIES (2011, methodology): “For NGC 2146 we quote the metallicity given by Engelbracht et al. (2008).”
The applicability of far-infrared fine-structure lines as star formation rate tracers over wide ranges of metallicities and galaxy types (2014, background): “2006; Madden et al. 2006; Draine et al. 2007; Engelbracht et al. 2008; Galliano et al. 2008), while the abundance of very small grains grows drastically relative to the large grain population due to the fragmentation of those large grains through shocks experienced in the turbulent ISM (Jones et…”