Dust Attenuation Curves in the Local Universe: Demographics and New Laws for Star-forming Galaxies and High-redshift Analogs
By S. Salim, M. Boquien, Janice C. Lee. 2018
321 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We study the dust attenuation curves of 230,000 individual galaxies in the local universe, ranging from quiescent to intensely star-forming systems, using GALEX, SDSS, and WISE photometry calibrated on the Herschel ATLAS. We use a new method of constraining SED fits with infrared luminosity (SED+LIR fitting), and parameterized attenuation curves determined with the CIGALE SED-fitting code. Attenuation curve slopes and UV bump strengths are reasonably well constrained independently from one another. We find that attenuation curves exhibit a very wide range of slopes that are on average as steep as the curve slope of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The slope is a strong function of optical opacity. Opaque galaxies have shallower curves—in agreement with recent radiative transfer models. The dependence of slopes on the opacity produces an apparent dependence on stellar mass: more massive galaxies have shallower slopes. Attenuation curves exhibit a wide range of UV bump amplitudes, from none to Milky Way (MW)-like, with an average strength one-third that of the MW bump. Notably, local analogs of high-redshift galaxies have an average curve that is somewhat steeper than the SMC curve, with a modest UV bump that can be, to first order, ignored, as its effect on the near-UV magnitude is 0.1 mag. Neither the slopes nor the strengths of the UV bump depend on gas-phase metallicity. Functional forms for attenuation laws are presented for normal star-forming galaxies, high-z analogs, and quiescent galaxies. We release the catalog of associated star formation rates and stellar masses (GALEX–SDSS–WISE Legacy Catalog 2).
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/db907eae068a433b7267d13d343e00e7741bd5d9
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Citations in the corpus
- simba: Cosmological simulations with black hole growth and feedback (2019, methodology): “Solid lines show the results from Simba at z = 0.1, while dashed lines show identically selected galaxies from the GSWLC-D2 catalog (Salim et al. 2018).”
- Data Release 1 of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (2025, unknown): “…bands is reemitted in the infrared; it estimates key galaxy and AGN properties such as stellar mass, star formation rate, and the AGN fraction ( the contribution of the AGN dusty torus to the total IR luminosity; e.g., L. Ciesla et al. 2015; S. Salim et al. 2018; G. Yang et al. 2020, 2022 ) .”
- A z = 0 Multiwavelength Galaxy Synthesis. I. A WISE and GALEX Atlas of Local Galaxies (2019, methodology): “For reference, Salim et al. (2018) use CIGALE (Boquien et al. 2019) to fit a star formation history that combines an old population, an exponentially decaying star formation history, and a younger population with nearly constant SFR.”
- The evolution of the galaxy UV luminosity function at redshifts z ≃ 8 – 15 from deep JWST and ground-based near-infrared imaging (2022, methodology): “…the 2016 updated version of the Bruzual & Charlot (2003) stellar population models with the MILES stellar spectral library, an emission line prescription calculated using the Cloudy photoionization code (Ferland et al. 2017), the Salim et al. (2018) dust attenuation model and a constant SFH model.”
- CIGALE: a python Code Investigating GALaxy Emission (2018, background): “…have been applied to study a wide variety of issues: why quiescent galaxies do not follow the starburst IRX–β relation (Boquien et al. 2012), the attenuation properties of galaxies (Buat et al. 2011, 2012, 2018; Boquien et al. 2013; Lo Faro et al. 2017; Salim et al. 2018, Decleir et al., in prep.)”