Galaxy And Mass Assembly: A new approach to quantifying dust in galaxies
arXiv:2505.13797 · doi:10.1017/pasa.2025.10028
Abstract
We introduce a new approach to quantifying dust in galaxies by combining information from the Balmer decrement (BD) and the dust mass (). While there is no explicit correlation between these two properties, they jointly probe different aspects of the dust present in galaxies. We explore two new parameters that link BD with by using star formation rate sensitive luminosities at several wavelengths (ultraviolet, H, and far-infrared). This analysis shows that combining the BD and in these ways provides new metrics that are sensitive to the degree of optically thick dust affecting the short wavelength emission. We show how these new ''dust geometry'' parameters vary as a function of galaxy mass, star formation rate, and specific star formation rate. We demonstrate that they are sensitive probes of the dust geometry in galaxies, and that they support the ''maximal foreground screen'' model for dust in starburst galaxies.
19 pages, 17 figures, to be published in PASA
References in corpus (38)
- Stellar population synthesis at the resolution of 2003
- Star Formation in Galaxies Along the Hubble Sequence
- The Dust Content and Opacity of Actively Star-Forming Galaxies
- The Host Galaxies of AGN
- A Simple Model for the Absorption of Starlight by Dust in Galaxies
- A simple model to interpret the ultraviolet, optical and infrared emission from galaxies
- Dust Absorption And The Ultraviolet Luminosity Density At z \approx 3 As Calibrated By Local Starburst Galaxies
- Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA): survey diagnostics and core data release
- The Dust Opacity of Star-Forming Galaxies
- Galaxy And Mass Assembly: Stellar Mass Estimates
- Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): end of survey report and data release 2
- Star formation rate indicators in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
- Star formation history and dust attenuation in galaxies drawn from ultraviolet surveys
- Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): The star formation rate dependence of the stellar initial mass function
- The Millennium Galaxy Catalogue: the B-band attenuation of bulge and disc light and the implied cosmic dust and stellar mass densities
- Towards a resolution of the discrepancy between different estimators of star formation rate
- The dust scaling relations of the Herschel Reference Survey
- Modelling the spectral energy distribution of galaxies. III. Attenuation of stellar light in spiral galaxies
- Modelling the spectral energy distribution of galaxies. V. The dust and PAH emission SEDs of disk galaxies
- Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): Panchromatic Data Release (far-UV --- far-IR) and the low-z energy budget
- Dust and Recent Star Formation in the Core of NGC5253
- A Theory for the Variation of Dust Attenuation Laws in Galaxies
- Dust Attenuation in Late-Type Galaxies. I. Effects on Bulge and Disk Components
- The Balmer decrement of SDSS galaxies
- Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): Assimilation of KiDS into the GAMA database
- The ISM scaling relations in DustPedia late-type galaxies: A benchmark study for the Local Universe
- Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA): Active Galactic Nuclei in Pairs of Galaxies
- Herschel-ATLAS: Revealing dust build-up and decline across gas, dust and stellar mass selected samples: I. Scaling relations
- Predicting dust extinction properties of star-forming galaxies from H-alpha/UV ratio
- Molecular Gas, Dust and Star Formation in Galaxies: II. Dust properties and scalings in \sim\ 1600 nearby galaxies
- Predicting the stellar and non-equilibrium dust emission spectra of high-resolution simulated galaxies with DART-Ray
- The Effects of Dust on the Spectral Energy Distributions of Star-Forming Galaxies
- GAMA/H-ATLAS: The ultraviolet spectral slope and obscuration in galaxies
- The resolved scaling relations in DustPedia: Zooming in on the local Universe
- Geometry effects on dust attenuation curves with different grain sources at high redshift
- GAMA/H-ATLAS: Common star-formation rate indicators and their dependence on galaxy physical parameters
- Star-dust geometry main determinant of dust attenuation in galaxies
- The dust and cold gas content of local star forming galaxies