A simple model to interpret the ultraviolet, optical and infrared emission from galaxies

By E. D. Cunha, S. Charlot, D. Elbaz. 2008

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We present a simple, largely empirical but physically motivated model to interpret the mid- and far-infrared spectral energy distributions of galaxies consistently with the emission at ultraviolet, optical and near-infrared wavelengths. Our model relies on an existing angle-averaged prescription to compute the absorption of starlight by dust in stellar birth clouds and in the ambient interstellar medium (ISM) in galaxies. We compute the spectral energy distribution of the power reradiated by dust in stellar birth clouds as the sum of three components: a component of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs); a mid-infrared continuum characterising the emission from hot grains at temperatures in the range 130–250 K; and a component of grains in thermal equilibrium with adjustable temperature in the range 30–60 K. In the ambient ISM, we fix for simplicity the relative proportions of these three components to reproduce the spectral shape of diffuse cirrus emission in the Milky Way, and we include a component of cold grains in thermal equilibrium with adjustable temperature in the range 15–25 K. Our model is both simple and versatile enough that it can be used to derive statistical constraints on the star formation histories and dust contents of large samples of galaxies using a wide range of ultraviolet, optical and infrared observations. We illustrate this by deriving median-likelihood estimates of the star formation rates, stellar masses, effective dust optical depths, dust masses, and relative strengths of different dust components of 66 well-studied nearby star-forming galaxies from the Spitzer Infrared Nearby Galaxy Survey (SINGS). We explore how the constraints derived in this way depend on the available spectral information. From our analysis of the SINGS sample, we conclude that the mid- and far-infrared colours of galaxies correlate strongly with the specific star formation rate, as well as with other galaxywide quantities connected to this parameter, such as the ratio of infrared luminosity between stellar birth clouds and the ambient ISM, the contributions by PAHs and grains in thermal equilibrium to the total infrared emission, and the ratio of dust mass to stellar mass. Our model can be straightforwardly applied to interpret ultraviolet, optical and infrared spectral energy distributions from any galaxy sample.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f734f3903f7d8d2c1f7da71fad902755a88afea2

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Citations in the corpus

THE EMISSION BY DUST AND STARS OF NEARBY GALAXIES IN THE HERSCHEL KINGFISH SURVEY (2011, methodology): “We also compare to da Cunha et al. (2008), who use the same stellar population models with exponentially declining star formation histories with bursts, and with the dust emission modeled as the sum of modified blackbodies at different temperatures.”
DUST-CORRECTED STAR FORMATION RATES OF GALAXIES. I. COMBINATIONS OF Hα AND INFRARED TRACERS (2009, methodology): “It is also notable that other widely adopted schemes such as the modified Charlot–Fall attenuation law (Wild et al. 2007; da Cunha et al. 2008) produce attenuations that are within 0.1 mag on average of those derived here.”
RECONSTRUCTING THE STELLAR MASS DISTRIBUTIONS OF GALAXIES USING S4G IRAC 3.6 AND 4.5 μm IMAGES. II. THE CONVERSION FROM LIGHT TO MASS (2014, background): “So far, the effect of dust on UV-to-optical emission from late-type spiral disks has been well modeled assuming a mix of foreground screen and birth-cloud extinction (e.g. Popescu et al. 2011; da Cunha et al. 2008).”
CIGALE: a python Code Investigating GALaxy Emission (2018, methodology): “To answer this question, Hunt et al. (2019) modelled the SED of the galaxies of the KINGFISH sample (Kennicutt et al. 2011) comparing results from CIGALE, MAGPHYS (da Cunha et al. 2008), and the latest iteration of grasil (Silva et al. 1998).”
Dust in the Reionization Era: ALMA Observations of a z = 8.38 Gravitationally Lensed Galaxy (2017, methodology): “We also ran an updated version of MAGPHYS (da Cunha et al. 2008) adapted for high-z galaxies (da Cunha et al. 2015).”
Analysis of galaxy spectral energy distributions from far-UV to far-IR with CIGALE: studying a SINGS test sample (2009, background): “…that the filters cover the entire relevant wavelength 12 Unfortunately, the completely different parameter set and a significantly different selection of test galaxies from SINGS impedes a qualitative and quantitative comparison of our code results to those of da Cunha et al. (2008). range).”
Modelling the spectral energy distribution of galaxies - V. The dust and PAH emission SEDs of disk galaxies (2010, methodology): “…by fitting the (typically sparsely sampled) measurements of PAH/dust emission either with phenomenological SED models (Devriendt et al. 1999, Dale & Helou 2002, Draine & Li 2007) or with SED models that use templates (Xu et al. 1998, Sajina et al. 2006, Marshall et al. 2007, da Cunha et al. 2008).”
A BUDGET AND ACCOUNTING OF METALS AT z ∼ 0: RESULTS FROM THE COS-HALOS SURVEY (2013, methodology): “…dust masses as a function of stellar mass from the Spitzer Infrared Nearby Galaxies Survey (SINGS; Draine et al. 2007), with stellar masses from da Cunha et al. (2008)14 and from the Herschel KINGFISH survey (Skibba et al. 2011).15 These samples were selected to be representative of normal…”
Tracing the cosmic growth of supermassive black holes to z ∼ 3 with Herschel (2014, methodology): “…of interstellar dust: polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs, in the range 3−12µm); mid-IR continuum from hot (130−250 K) dust grains; and thermal emission, both from warm (30−60 K) and cold (15−25 K) dust grains in thermal equilibrium, according to da Cunha et al. (2008) prescriptions.”
An ALMA survey of the SCUBA-2 CLS UDS field: physical properties of 707 sub-millimetre galaxies (2019, background): “For a full description of MAGPHYS, see da Cunha et al. (2008; 2015) and Battisti et al. (2019).”
SUBMILLIMETER GALAXIES AS PROGENITORS OF COMPACT QUIESCENT GALAXIES (2014, methodology): “Briefly, stellar masses were derived by fitting the observed broadband UV-MIR spectral energy distributions with the MAGPHYS code (da Cunha et al. 2008).”
GALEX–SDSS–WISE LEGACY CATALOG (GSWLC): STAR FORMATION RATES, STELLAR MASSES, AND DUST ATTENUATIONS OF 700,000 LOW-REDSHIFT GALAXIES (2016, methodology): “This approach is used in MAGPHYS (da Cunha et al. 2008), which models the IR SED as a sum of various SED components, the relative contribution of which is mildly related to galaxy’s SSFR. CIGALE allows the IR SED to be modeled according to one of the four published template sets, without…”
Empirical determination of the shape of dust attenuation curves in star-forming galaxies (2011, background): “Other possible estimations ofτV could come from the measurement of the dust emission in the FIR (da Cunha et al. 2008), or depth of the mid-IR silicate absorption feature (Wild et al. 2011).”
ALMA SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY IN THE HUBBLE ULTRA DEEP FIELD: THE INFRARED EXCESS OF UV-SELECTED z = 2–10 GALAXIES AS A FUNCTION OF UV-CONTINUUM SLOPE AND STELLAR MASS (2016, methodology): “We also estimated stellar masses for our sources by using the MAGPHYS software (da Cunha et al. 2008) to model the photometry for the 330 z = 2-10 sources that make up our samples.”
A z = 0 Multiwavelength Galaxy Synthesis. I. A WISE and GALEX Atlas of Local Galaxies (2019, methodology): “Their fits include energy balance (e.g., da Cunha et al. 2008) with the IR luminosity extrapolated from the 22µm band (or 12µm if 22µm is not detected) via the IR templates of Chary & Elbaz (2001).”
Stellar Population Inference with Prospector (2020, methodology): “…additional components (i.e. recent bursts), by choosing more flexible forms for the parametric SFH (e.g., Salim et al. 2007; Carnall et al. 2018), or using a library of SFHs based on semi-analytic or hydrodynamic simulations (e.g., da Cunha et al. 2008; Pacifici et al. 2013; Iyer et al. 2019).”