The Calibration of Mid-Infrared Star Formation Rate Indicators

By D. Calzetti, Robert C. Kennicutt Jr., C. Engelbracht, C. Leitherer, B. Draine, Lisa J. Kewley, John Moustakas, M. Sosey, D. Dale, K. Gordon and 29 more. 2007

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With the goal of investigating the degree to which the MIR emission traces the SFR, we analyze Spitzer 8 and 24 μm data of star-forming regions in a sample of 33 nearby galaxies with available HST NICMOS images in the Paα (1.8756 μm) emission line. The galaxies are drawn from the SINGS sample and cover a range of morphologies and a factor ~10 in oxygen abundance. Published data on local low-metallicity starburst galaxies and LIRGs are also included in the analysis. Both the stellar continuum-subtracted 8 μm emission and the 24 μm emission correlate with the extinction-corrected Paα line emission, although neither relationship is linear. Simple models of stellar populations and dust extinction and emission are able to reproduce the observed nonlinear trend of the 24 μm emission versus number of ionizing photons, including the modest deficiency of 24 μm emission in the low-metallicity regions, which results from a combination of decreasing dust opacity and dust temperature at low luminosities. Conversely, the trend of the 8 μm emission as a function of the number of ionizing photons is not well reproduced by the same models. The 8 μm emission is contributed, in larger measure than the 24 μm emission, by dust heated by nonionizing stellar populations, in addition to the ionizing ones, in agreement with previous findings. Two SFR calibrations, one using the 24 μm emission and the other using a combination of the 24 μm and Hα luminosities (Kennicutt and coworkers), are presented. No calibration is presented for the 8 μm emission because of its significant dependence on both metallicity and environment. The calibrations presented here should be directly applicable to systems dominated by ongoing star formation.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b7121e295bd7894e6f4ced14fdea24c61d9f18e4

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Citations in the corpus

CALIBRATING EXTINCTION-FREE STAR FORMATION RATE DIAGNOSTICS WITH 33 GHz FREE–FREE EMISSION IN NGC 6946 (2011, methodology): “(1) For reference, the coefficient relating the SFR and ionizing photon rate given in Kennicutt (1998) is a factor of ≈1.5 times larger than that above (see Calzetti et al. 2007, for a discussion on the origin of this difference).”
A remarkably flat relationship between the average star formation rate and AGN luminosity for distant X-ray AGN. (2015, methodology): “…of star formation, a significant advantage over more direct tracers, such as the UV and optical emission from the young massive stars, is that it does not suffer significantly from obscuration (e.g. Kennicutt 1998; Calzetti et al. 2007; Calzetti et al. 2010; see also section 2.2 in Lutz 2014).”
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, background): “…SFRs for the entire sample derived from the extrapolated rest-frame 24 µm luminosities and the calibration given by Alonso-Herrero et al. (2006, see also Calzetti et al. 2007) are a factor of 2–3 smaller at z&2 than those derived directly from extrapolated estimations of the total IR luminosity.”
Metallicity Effects on Dust Properties in Starbursting Galaxies (2008, background): “…the metallicity decreases, the relation between star formation and L(TIR) will depart from the Kennicutt relation and L(TIR) will eventually cease to be useful by itself to determine star formation rates (see, e.g., Pérez-González et al. (2006); Calzetti et al. (2007); Kennicutt et al. (2007)).”
A MOLECULAR STAR FORMATION LAW IN THE ATOMIC-GAS-DOMINATED REGIME IN NEARBY GALAXIES (2011, background): “We adopt the Hα+24µm calibration by Calzetti et al. (2007) and the FUV+24µm combination from Leroy et al. (2008), ΣSFR(Hα+24)= ( 2.9×10−2 IHα + 2.5×10 −3 I24µm ) × cos i (3) ΣSFR(FUV+24)= ( 8.1×10−2 IFUV + 3.2×10 −3 I24µm ) × cos i (4) where ΣSFR has units of M⊙ yr −1 kpc−2 and Hα, FUV, and 24 µm…”
A CONSTANT MOLECULAR GAS DEPLETION TIME IN NEARBY DISK GALAXIES (2011, background): “This emission correlates closely with other signatures of recent star formation, especially Hα emission, and so has been used to correct optical and UV tracers for the effects of extinction (Calzetti et al. 2007; Kennicutt et al. 2007).”
SPITZER QUASAR AND ULIRG EVOLUTION STUDY (QUEST). IV. COMPARISON OF 1 Jy ULTRALUMINOUS INFRARED GALAXIES WITH PALOMAR-GREEN QUASARS (2009, background): “The competition of the dust with the gas for absorption of the ionizing photons becomes increasingly more effective as the density of the star-forming regions increases, so the [Ne II]/FIR ratio is reduced in ULIRGs (e.g., Rigby & Rieke 2004; Dopita et al. 2006; Calzetti et al. 2007).”
Investigations of dust heating in M81, M83 and NGC 2403 with the Herschel Space Observatory (2011, methodology): “However, these techniques have only been developed for either compact sources within galaxies (Calzetti et al. 2007) or for global flux density measurements (Zhu et al. 2008; Kennicutt et al. 2009).”
DUST-CORRECTED STAR FORMATION RATES OF GALAXIES. I. COMBINATIONS OF Hα AND INFRARED TRACERS (2009, methodology): “…the dust-enshrouded SFR, calibrations based at specific wavebands such as the rest 8 μm and 24 μm emission have been derived by various authors (e.g., Calzetti et al. 2005, 2007; 1672 Wu et al. 2005; Alonso-Herrero et al. 2006; Pérez-González et al. 2006; Relaño et al. 2007; Bavouzet et al.…”
BULGES OF NEARBY GALAXIES WITH SPITZER: SCALING RELATIONS IN PSEUDOBULGES AND CLASSICAL BULGES (2010, background): “Calzetti et al. (2007) show that differences in interstellar medium metallicity, and likely stellar populations of the galaxy, can strongly affect the correlation between 8 μm emission and luminosity of ionizing photons.”
THE CALIBRATION OF MONOCHROMATIC FAR-INFRARED STAR FORMATION RATE INDICATORS (2010, methodology): “The present calibration is based on a >1 Gyr age constant star formation stellar population, while the calibration in Calzetti et al. (2007) is based on a 100 Myr age constant star formation population.”
ESTIMATING THE STAR FORMATION RATE AT 1 kpc SCALES IN NEARBY GALAXIES (2012, methodology): “Assuming the Paα to trace the true SFR, Calzetti et al. (2007) found: ΣSFR [ M⊙ yr −1 kpc−2 ] = 634 IHα [ erg s−1 sr−1 ] +(10) 13 AHα refers to the extinction (in magnitudes) of Hα emission by dust.”
Physical properties and environments of nearby galaxies (2009, methodology): “…observations with Spitzer and GALEX have led to a new class of hybrid SFR indicators that use a weighted combination of UV/optical and infrared luminosity to minimize the systematic effects of dust obscuration (Gordon et al. 2000; Kennicutt et al. 2007; Calzetti et al. 2007; Rieke et al. 2008.”
Analysis of galaxy spectral energy distributions from far-UV to far-IR with CIGALE: studying a SINGS test sample (2009, background): “They are based on Hα emission, which is a thoroughly studied and relatively reliable SFR indicator (see, e.g., Kennicutt 1998; Brinchmann et al. 2004; Kewley et al. 2004; Calzetti et al. 2007).”
THE STATE OF THE GAS AND THE RELATION BETWEEN GAS AND STAR FORMATION AT LOW METALLICITY: THE SMALL MAGELLANIC CLOUD (2011, methodology): “The calibration by Calzetti et al. (2007) is derived on spatial scales of hundreds of parsecs.”
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.”
CIGALE: a python Code Investigating GALaxy Emission (2018, background): “Indeed, even though mid-IR emission in galaxies is often used as a tracer of star-formation (e.g., Calzetti et al. 2007), the stellar contamination can be important.”
SPITZER SAGE SURVEY OF THE LARGE MAGELLANIC CLOUD. III. STAR FORMATION AND ∼1000 NEW CANDIDATE YOUNG STELLAR OBJECTS (2008, methodology): “We required that each source have at least three detections among the five IRAC and MIPS24 bands, each with the modified signal-tonoise (flux/error) > 10.”