Modelling the nebular emission from primeval to present-day star-forming galaxies

By Julia Gutkin, S. Charlot, G. Bruzual. 2016

196 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a new model of the nebular emission from star-forming galaxies in a wide range of chemical compositions, appropriate to interpret observations of galaxies at all cosmic epochs. The model relies on the combination of state-of-the-art stellar population synthesis and photoionization codes to describe the ensemble of H ii regions and the diffuse gas ionized by young stars in a galaxy. A main feature of this model is the self-consistent yet versatile treatment of element abundances and depletion on to dust grains, which allows one to relate the observed nebular emission from a galaxy to both gas-phase and dust-phase metal enrichment. We show that this model can account for the rest-frame ultraviolet and optical emission-line properties of galaxies at different redshifts and find that ultraviolet emission lines are more sensitive than optical ones to parameters such as C/O abundance ratio, hydrogen gas density, dust-to-metal mass ratio and upper cut-off of the stellar initial mass function. We also find that, for gas-phase metallicities around solar to slightly subsolar, widely used formulae to constrain oxygen ionic fractions and the C/O ratio from ultraviolet and optical emission-line luminosities are reasonable faithful. However, the recipes break down at non-solar metallicities, making them inappropriate to study chemically young galaxies. In such cases, a fully self-consistent model of the kind presented in this paper is required to interpret the observed nebular emission.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d0ab646fb188c6f73bffdaf7a827a339ae509c83

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

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First results from the TNG50 simulation: galactic outflows driven by supernovae and black hole feedback (2019, background): “…would imply a level of modeling detail which would also enable direct predictions of synthetic nebular emission lines from the ISM itself (Gutkin et al. 2016; Byler et al. 2017), as well as extended and extraplanar ionized gas reservoirs (e.g. Jones et al. 2017), in the context of…”