A z=0 Multi-wavelength Galaxy Synthesis I: A WISE and GALEX Atlas of Local Galaxies [GA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1910.13470


We present an atlas of ultraviolet and infrared images of ~15,750 local (d < 50 Mpc) galaxies, as observed by NASA’s WISE and GALEX missions. These maps have matched resolution (FWHM 7.5” and 15”), matched astrometry, and a common procedure for background removal. We demonstrate that they agree well with resolved intensity measurements and integrated photometry from previous surveys. This atlas represents the first part of a program (the z=0 Multi-wavelength Galaxy Synthesis) to create a large, uniform database of resolved measurements of gas and dust in nearby galaxies. The images and associated catalogs are publicly available at the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive. This atlas allows us estimate local and integrated star formation rates (SFRs) and stellar masses (M$\star$) across the local galaxy population in a uniform way. In the appendix, we use the population synthesis fits of Salim et al. (2016, 2018) to calibrate integrated M$\star$ and SFR estimators based on GALEX and WISE. Because they leverage an SDSS-base training set of >100,000 galaxies, these calibrations have high precision and allow us to rigorously compare local galaxies to Sloan Digital Sky Survey results. We provide these SFR and M$_\star$ estimates for all galaxies in our sample and show that our results yield a “main sequence” of star forming galaxies comparable to previous work. We also show the distribution of intensities from resolved galaxies in NUV-to-WISE1 vs. WISE1-to-WISE3 space, which captures much of the key physics accessed by these bands.

Read this paper on arXiv…

A. Leroy, K. Sandstrom, D. Lang, et. al.
Thu, 31 Oct 19
31/55

Comments: 46 pages, 27 figures, published in ApJS (this https URL ). See that version for full resolution figures and machine readable tables. Go download data for your favorite nearby galaxy here: this https URL . The appendix presents detailed analysis of translations to physical quantities