paper

Pah and Mid-IR Luminosities as Measures of Star-Formation Rate in Spitzer First Look Survey Galaxies

arXiv:astro-ph/0509281 · doi:10.1086/497961

Abstract

We present evidence that the 8 m (dust) and 24 m luminosities of star-forming galaxies are both strongly correlated with their 1.4 GHz and H luminosities over a range in luminosity of two-to-three orders of magnitude. At the bright end, the correlations are found to be essentially linear over a luminosity range of about two orders of magnitude (corresponding to star-formation rates of several-tenths to several tens of solar masses per year). However, at the faint end, there appears to be a slope change for dwarf galaxies, possibly due to the lower dust-to-gas ratios and lower metallicities of the dwarfs. The correlations suggest that PAH features and mid-IR continuum emissions are good measures of the star formation rates of galaxies, and we present calibrations of star-formation rates based on existing radio and H relations. Our findings are based on a sample of star-forming galaxies selected from the main field of the Spitzer First Look Survey with the aid of spectroscopic data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and VLA 1.4 GHz data.

7 pages, 2 Postscript figures, published by ApJ Letter

References in corpus (27)

Cited by in corpus (170)