An Empirical Determination of the Dust Mass Absorption Coefficient, $κ_{d}$, Using the Herschel Reference Survey

Christopher J. R. Clark; Simon P. Schofield; Haley L. Gomez; Jonathan I. Davies

doi:10.1093/mnras/stw647

paper

An Empirical Determination of the Dust Mass Absorption Coefficient, $κ_{d}$ , Using the Herschel Reference Survey

arXiv:1603.04860 · doi:10.1093/mnras/stw647

Abstract

We use the published photometry and spectroscopy of 22 galaxies in the Herschel Reference Survey to determine that the value of the dust mass absorption coefficient $κ_{d}$ at a wavelength of 500 $μ m$ is $κ_{500} = 0.05 1_{- 0.026}^{+ 0.070} m^{2} k g^{- 1}$ . We do so by taking advantage of the fact that the dust-to-metals ratio in the interstellar medium of galaxies appears to be constant. We argue that our value for $κ_{d}$ supersedes that of James et al. (2002) -- who pioneered this approach for determining $κ_{d}$ -- because we take advantage of superior data, and account for a number of significant systematic effects that they did not consider. We comprehensively incorporate all methodological and observational contributions to establish the uncertainty on our value, which represents a marked improvement on the oft-quoted 'order-of-magnitude' uncertainty on $κ_{d}$ . We find no evidence that the value of $κ_{d}$ differs significantly between galaxies, or that it correlates with any other measured or derived galaxy properties. We note, however, that the availability of data limits our sample to relatively massive ( $1 0^{9.7} < M_{⋆} < 1 0^{11.0} M_{⊙}$ ), high metallicity ( $8.61 < [12 + log_{10} \frac{O}{H}] < 8.86$ ) galaxies; future work will allow us to investigate a wider range of systems.

arXiv commentAccepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

An Empirical Determination of the Dust Mass Absorption Coefficient, $κ_{d}$ , Using the Herschel Reference Survey

Abstract

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An Empirical Determination of the Dust Mass Absorption Coefficient, κd​, Using the Herschel Reference Survey

Abstract

References in corpus (90)

Cited by in corpus (42)

An Empirical Determination of the Dust Mass Absorption Coefficient, $κ_{d}$ , Using the Herschel Reference Survey