Age and Dust Degeneracy for Starburst Galaxies Solved?

Abstract

A spectral evolution model of galaxies that includes both stellar and dust effects is newly built. xApplying the model to 22 nearby starburst galaxies, we have shown that far infrared luminosity of galaxies helps to break the age-dustiness degeneracy. We have derived a unique solution of age and the dustiness for each starburst galaxy. The resulting starburst ages and optical depths are in the range $10\le t(Myr)\le 500$ and $0.5\le {\tau }_V\le 5.0$, respectively. The result is robust and is almost independent of model assumptions such as dust distributions, extinction curves, and burst strengths. With the rapidly growing sensitivity of submillimeter detectors, it should become possible in the near future to determine the age and ${\tau }_V$ of star-forming galaxies at redshifts $z\simeq 3$ and beyond. Accurate estimates of ${\tau }_V$ for Lyman-break galaxies and high-z galaxies might require a substantial revision of the previously claimed picture of star formation history over the Hubble time.

Latex (aas2pp4) 15 pages, 1 table, 6 figures. Accepted for ApJ

References in corpus (7)

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• Evolutionary SED diagnostics of starburst galaxies: signature of bimodality
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• Spectral Energy Distributions of Dusty Galaxies
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• CIRPASS near-infrared integral-field spectroscopy of massive star clusters in the starburst galaxy NGC 1140
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• The PAU Survey: Measurement of Narrow-band galaxy properties with Approximate Bayesian Computation
• Geometry effects on dust attenuation curves with different grain sources at high redshift
• Dust masses of $z>5$ galaxies from SED fitting and ALMA upper limits
• Formation and evolution of dusty starburst galaxies I. A new method for deriving spectral energy distribution
• The host galaxy of GRB 011121: Morphology and Spectral Energy Distribution
• Ultraviolet-to-far-infra-red self-consistent analysis of the stellar populations of massive starburst galaxies at intermediate redshifts