The distribution of interstellar dust in CALIFA edge-on galaxies via oligochromatic radiative transfer fitting

Abstract

We investigate the amount and spatial distribution of interstellar dust in edge-on spiral galaxies, using detailed radiative transfer modeling of a homogeneous sample of 12 galaxies selected from the CALIFA survey. Our automated fitting routine, FitSKIRT, was first validated against artificial data. This is done by simultaneously reproducing the SDSS $g$-, $r$-, $i$- and $z$-band observations of a toy model in order to combine the information present in the different bands. We show that this combined, oligochromatic fitting, has clear advantages over standard monochromatic fitting especially regarding constraints on the dust properties. We model all galaxies in our sample using a three-component model, consisting of a double exponential disc to describe the stellar and dust discs and using a Sérsic profile to describe the central bulge. The full model contains 19 free parameters, and we are able to constrain all these parameters to a satisfactory level of accuracy without human intervention or strong boundary conditions. Apart from two galaxies, the entire sample can be accurately reproduced by our model. We find that the dust disc is about 75% more extended but only half as high as the stellar disc. The average face-on optical depth in the V-band is $0.76$ and the spread of $0.60$ within our sample is quite substantial, which indicates that some spiral galaxies are relatively opaque even when seen face-on.

18 pages, 6 figures, 4 tables, Accepted for publication in MNRAS

References in corpus (17)

• The UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS)
• Infrared Emission from Interstellar Dust. IV. The Silicate-Graphite-PAH Model in the Post-Spitzer Era
• Spectra and Light Curves of Six Type Ia Supernovae at 0.511 < z < 1.12 and the Union2 Compilation
• Dust Masses, PAH Abundances, and Starlight Intensities in the SINGS Galaxy Sample
• Structural Properties of Pseudo-Bulges, Classical Bulges and Elliptical Galaxies: an SDSS Perspective
• Sunrise: Polychromatic Dust Radiative Transfer in Arbitrary Geometries
• CALIFA, the Calar Alto Legacy Integral Field Area survey. II. First public data release
• Kinematics of the Local Universe XIII. 21-cm line measurements of 452 galaxies with the Nançay radiotelescope, JHK Tully-Fisher relation and preliminary maps of the peculiar velocity field
• Dust Extinction and Emission in a Clumpy Galactic Disk. An Application of the Radiative Transfer Code TRADING
• SFI++ II: A New I-band Tully-Fisher Catalog, Derivation of Peculiar Velocities and Dataset Properties
• The dust distribution in edge-on galaxies. Radiative transfer fits of V and K'-band images
• The Infrared Properties of Hickson Compact Groups
• Early-type galaxies with core collapse supernovae
• On the 3 dimensional structure of edge-on disk galaxies
• The Revealing Dust: Mid-Infrared Activity in Hickson Compact Group Galaxy Nuclei
• Smart detectors for Monte Carlo radiative transfer
• Dust formation in massive stars and their explosive ends

Cited by in corpus (42)

• SKIRT: an Advanced Dust Radiative Transfer Code with a User-Friendly Architecture
• CALIFA, the Calar Alto Legacy Integral Field Area survey. III. Second public data release
• DustPedia - A Definitive Study of Cosmic Dust in the Local Universe
• Radial distribution of dust, stars, gas, and star-formation rate in DustPedia face-on galaxies
• Far-infrared and dust properties of present-day galaxies in the EAGLE simulations
• High-resolution, 3D radiative transfer modeling : I. The grand-design spiral galaxy M51
• The Herschel Exploitation of Local Galaxy Andromeda (HELGA) VII: A SKIRT radiative transfer model and insights on dust heating
• Characterizing Dust Attenuation in Local Star Forming Galaxies: Inclination Effects and the 2175Å Feature
• Revealing the dust attenuation properties on resolved scales in NGC628 with SWIFT UVOT data
• Large and small-scale structures and the dust energy balance problem in spiral galaxies
• High-Resolution Radiative Transfer Modelling of M33
• Galaxies with conspicuous optical warps
• High-resolution, 3D radiative transfer modelling III. The DustPedia barred galaxies
• The resolved scaling relations in DustPedia: Zooming in on the local Universe
• High-resolution, 3D radiative transfer modelling. II. The early-type spiral galaxy M81
• SKIRT: hybrid parallelization of radiative transfer simulations
• Sizing Up the Milky Way: A Bayesian Mixture Model Meta-Analysis of Photometric Scale Length Measurements
• High-resolution synthetic UV-submm images for Milky Way-mass simulated galaxies from the ARTEMIS project
• Supernovae and their host galaxies - V. The vertical distribution of supernovae in disc galaxies
• High-resolution, 3D radiative transfer modelling IV. AGN-powered dust heating in NGC 1068
• Nonparametric galaxy morphology from UV to submm wavelengths
• Wobbly discs -- corrugations seen in the dust lanes of edge-on galaxies
• Effects of Spatial Discretization in Lyman-alpha Line Radiation Transfer Simulations
• Measuring the X-shaped structures in edge-on galaxies
• The Fornax 3D project: dust mix and gas properties in the center of early-type galaxy FCC 167
• JWST's PEARLS: dust attenuation and gravitational lensing in the backlit-galaxy system VV 191
• The distribution of dust in edge-on galaxies: I. The global structure
• Dissecting the active galactic nucleus in Circinus -- III. VLT/FORS2 polarimetry confirms dusty cone illuminated by a tilted accretion disc
• Starduster: A multi-wavelength SED model based on radiative transfer simulations and deep learning
• The problem of dust attenuation in photometric decomposition of edge-on galaxies and possible solutions
• The Shape of Dark Matter Haloes IV. The Structure of Stellar Discs in Edge-on Galaxies
• A new analytical scattering phase function for interstellar dust
• A radiation transfer model for the Milky Way. II The global properties and large scale structure
• Gaia DR2 giants in the Galactic dust -- II. Application of the reddening maps and models
• The MUSE view of the Sculptor galaxy: survey overview and the planetary nebulae luminosity function
• Constraining Type Ia supernovae through their heights in edge-on galaxies
• Radiative transfer in disc galaxies $-$ V. The accuracy of the KB approximation
• Edge-on galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field
• Decoding NGC 628 with radiative transfer methods
• Assessing differences between local galaxy dust attenuation and point source extinction within the same environments
• Comparing the structural parameters of the Milky Way to other spiral galaxies
• The vertical structure of the stellar disk in NGC 551