Mapping dust attenuation and the 2175 Å bump at kpc scales in nearby galaxies [GA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2212.01918


We develop a novel approach to measure dust attenuation properties of galaxies,including the dust opacity and shape of the attenuation curve in both optical and NUV, as well as the strength of the 2175{\AA} absorption feature. From an observed spectrum the method uses a model-independent approach to derive a relative attenuation curve.The absolute amplitude is then calibrated with the NIR photometry. The dust-corrected spectrum is fitted with stellar population models to derive the dust-free model spectrum covering the whole wavelength range from NUV to NIR and is compared with the observed SED/spectrum to determine dust attenuation properties. We apply this method to investigate dust attenuation on kpc scales, using a sample of 134 galaxies with the integral field spectroscopy from MaNGA, the NIR imaging from 2MASS, and the NUV imaging from Swift/UVOT. We find that the attenuation curves in regions of kpc scales span a wide range of slopes in both optical and UV. The slope is shallower at higher optical opacity, a trend that is held even when the sample is limited to narrow ranges of specific star formation rate (sSFR), minor-to-major axis ratio (b/a) and the location within individual galaxies. The 2175{\AA} bump in the attenuation curve at kpc scales presents a wide range of strength. The strength shows a strong negative correlation with the sSFR, but the correlations with the optical opacity, $b/a$ and the location within individual galaxies are all weak. All these trends appear to be independent of the stellar mass of galaxies, implying that the dust attenuation is regulated by local processes rather than by global properties of galaxies. Our results support the scenario that the variation of the 2175{\AA} bump is driven predominantly by processes related to star formation, such as destruction of small dust grains by UV radiation in star-forming regions.

Read this paper on arXiv…

S. Zhou, C. Li, N. Li, et. al.
Tue, 6 Dec 22
6/87

Comments: 14 pages,9 figures