paper

Characterizing the UV-to-NIR shape of the dust attenuation curve of IR luminous galaxies up to z2

arXiv:1707.09805 · doi:10.1093/mnras/stx1901

Abstract

In this work we investigate the far-UV to NIR shape of the dust attenuation curve of a sample of IR selected dust obscured (U)LIRGs at z2. The spectral energy distributions (SEDs) are fitted with CIGALE, a physically-motivated spectral synthesis model based on energy balance. Its flexibility allows us to test a wide range of different analytical prescriptions for the dust attenuation curve, including the well-known Calzetti and Charlot & Fall curves, and modified versions of them. The attenuation curves computed under the assumption of our reference double power-law model are in very good agreement with those derived, in previous works, with radiative transfer (RT) SED fitting. We investigate the position of our galaxies in the IRX- diagram and find this to be consistent with grayer slopes, on average, in the UV. We also find evidence for a flattening of the attenuation curve in the NIR with respect to more classical Calzetti-like recipes. This larger NIR attenuation yields larger derived stellar masses from SED fitting, by a median factor of 1.4 and up to a factor 10 for the most extreme cases. The star formation rate appears instead to be more dependent on the total amount of attenuation in the galaxy. Our analysis highlights the need for a flexible attenuation curve when reproducing the physical properties of a large variety of objects.

arXiv comment20 pages, 14 figures

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