Star-formation rate and stellar mass calibrations based on infrared photometry and their dependence on stellar population age and extinction

Abstract

The stellar mass ($M_{\star }$) and the star-formation rate (SFR) are among the most important features that characterize galaxies. Measuring these fundamental properties accurately is critical for understanding the present state of galaxies, and their history. This work explores the dependence of the IR emission of galaxies on their extinction, and the age of their stellar populations (SPs). It aims at providing accurate IR SFR and $M_{\star }$ calibrations that account for SP age and extinction while quantifying their scatter. We use the CIGALE spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting code to create models of galaxies with a wide range of star-formation histories, dust content, and interstellar medium properties. We fit the relations between $M_{\star }$ and SFR with IR and optical photometry of the model-galaxy SEDs with the MCMC method, and perform a machine-learning random forest analysis on the same data set in order to validate the latter. This work provides calibrations for the SFR using a combination of the WISE bands 1 and 3, or the JWST F200W and F2100W bands. It also provides mass-to-light ratio calibrations based on the WISE band-1, or the JWST band F200W, along with the optical $u-r$ or $g-r$ colors. These calibrations account for the biases attributed to the SP age, while they are given in the form of extinction-dependent and extinction-independent relations. They show robust estimations while minimizing the scatter and biases throughout a wide range of SFRs and stellar masses. The SFR calibration offers better results, especially in dust-free or passive galaxies where the contributions of old SPs or biases from the lack of dust are significant. Similarly, the $M_{\star }$ calibration yields significantly better results for dusty/high-SFR galaxies where dust emission can otherwise bias the estimations.

18 pages, 10 figures. Accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics on 16 March 2023

References in corpus (18)

• The James Webb Space Telescope
• UV Star Formation Rates in the Local Universe
• A Highly Consistent Framework for the Evolution of the Star-Forming "Main Sequence" from z~0-6
• The rapid formation a large rotating disk galaxy three billion years after the Big Bang
• GALEX-SDSS-WISE Legacy Catalog (GSWLC): Star Formation Rates, Stellar Masses and Dust Attenuations of 700,000 Low-redshift Galaxies
• A z=0 Multi-wavelength Galaxy Synthesis I: A WISE and GALEX Atlas of Local Galaxies
• Stellar Masses and SFRs for 1M Galaxies from SDSS and WISE
• The ATLAS3D Project - XXVIII. Dynamically-driven star formation suppression in early-type galaxies
• UV Dust Attenuation in Star-forming Galaxies: II Calibrating the A(UV) vs. L_TIR/L_UV relation
• Mid-IR Luminosities and UV/Optical Star Formation Rates at z<1.4
• The main sequence of star forming galaxies I. The local relation and its bending
• Old and young stellar populations in DustPedia galaxies and their role in dust heating
• Impact of star formation history on the measurement of star formation rates
• The Heraklion Extragalactic Catalogue (HECATE): a value-added galaxy catalogue for multi-messenger astrophysics
• Sub-galactic scaling relations between X-ray luminosity, star-formation rate, and stellar mass
• The Star Formation Reference Survey-V: the effect of extinction, stellar mass, metallicity, and nuclear activity on star-formation rates based on H$\alpha$ emission
• Probing the spectral shape of dust emission with the DustPedia galaxy sample
• The Star Formation Reference Survey. IV. Stellar mass distribution of local star-forming galaxies