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Register a new userThe UV colours and dust attenuation of Lyman-break galaxies
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Violeta Gonzalez-Perez
Publication date
2012
fields
Physics
and research's language is
English
Authors
V. Gonzalez-Perez
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Using GALFORM, a semi-analytical model of galaxy formation in the Lambda cold dark matter cosmology, we study the rest-frame ultraviolet (UV) colours of Lyman-break galaxies (LBGs) in the redshift range 2.5 < z < 10. As the impact of dust on UV luminosity can be dramatic, our model includes a self-consistent computation of dust attenuation based on a radiative transfer model. We find that intrinsically brighter galaxies suffer stronger dust attenuation than fainter ones, though the relation has a large scatter. The model predicts galaxies with UV colours consistent with the colour selection regions designed to select LBGs in observational surveys. We find that the drop-out technique that selects LBGs based on two rest-frame UV colours is robust and effective, selecting more than 70 per cent of UV bright galaxies at a given redshift. We investigate the impact on the predicted UV colours of varying selected model parameters. We find that the UV colours are most sensitive to the modelling of dust attenuation and in particular, to the extinction curve used in the radiative transfer calculation. If we assume a Milky Way dust extinction curve, the predicted UV continuum slopes are, in general, bluer than observed. However, we find that the opposite is true when using the Small Magellanic Cloud dust extinction curve. This demonstrates the strong dependence of UV colours on dust properties and highlights the inadequacy of using the UV continuum slope as a tracer of dust attenuation without any further knowledge of the galaxy inclination or dust characteristics in high redshift galaxies.
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We present our analysis of UV attenuation by internal dust of a large sample (N=906 galaxies) of Lyman Break Galaxies (LBGs). Using spectral energy distributions (SEDs) from the PEGASE galaxy spectral evolution model we apply dust attenuation corrections to the G-R colors using the Witt & Gordon (2000) models for radiative transfer in dusty galactic environments to arrive at the UV attenuation factors. We show that the dust in the LBGs exhibit SMC-like characteristics rather than MW-like, and that the dust geometry in these systems is most likely to be represented by a clumpy shell configuration. We show that the attenuation factor exhibits a pronounced dependence on the luminosity of the LBG, $a_{1600}propto (L/L_sun)^alpha$, where $0.5leqalphaleq1.5$. The exponent $alpha$ depends on the initial parameters of the stellar population chosen to model the galaxies and the dust properties. We find that the luminosity weighted average attenuation factor is likely to be in the range from $5.7-18.5$, which is consistent with the upper limits to the star formation rate at $2<z<4$ set by the FIR background. This implies that the current UV/optical surveys do detect the bulk of the star formation during the epoch $2<z<4$, but require substantial correction for internal dust attenuation.
This work explores from a statistical point of view the rest-frame Far-ultraviolet (FUV) to Far-infrared (FIR) emission of a population of Lyman break galaxies (LBGs) at $zsim3$ that cannot be individually detected from current FIR observations. We perform a stacking analysis over a sample of $sim$17000 LBGs at redshift $2.5<z<3.5$ in the COSMOS field. The sample is binned as a function of UV luminosity ($L_{mathrm{FUV}}$), UV continuum slope ($beta_{mathrm{UV}}$), and stellar mass (M$_{*}$), and then, stacked at optical ($BVriz$ bands), near-infrared ($YJHKs$ bands), IRAC (3.6, 4.5, 5.6 and 8.0 $mu$m), MIPS (24$mu$m), PACS (100 and 160~$mu$m), SPIRE (250, 350, and 500~$mu$m), and AzTEC (1.1mm) observations. We obtain thirty rest-frame FUV-to-FIR spectral energy distribution (SEDs) of LBGs at $zsim3$, and analyse them with CIGALE SED-fitting analysis code. We are able to derive fully consistent physical parameters (M$_{*}$, $beta_{mathrm{UV}}$, $L_{mathrm{FUV}}$, $L_{mathrm{IR}}$, A$_{FUV}$, SFR, and slope of the dust attenuation law), and build a semi-empirical library of thirty rest-frame FUV-to-FIR stacked LBG SEDs as a function of $L_{mathrm{FUV}}$, $beta_{mathrm{UV}}$, and M$_{*}$. We used the so-called IR-excess ($IRX equiv L_{mathrm{IR}} / L_{mathrm{FUV}}$) to investigate the dust attenuation as a function of $beta_{mathrm{UV}}$ and M$_{*}$. Additionally, the SED-fitting analysis results provide a diversity of dust attenuation curve along the LBG sample, and their slope are well correlated with M$_{*}$. Stepper dust attenuations curves than Calzettis are favoured in low stellar mass LBGs ($log(M_{*} [M_{odot}]) < 10.25$), while grayer ones are favoured in high stellar mass LBGs ($log(M_{*} [M_{odot}]) > 10.25$).
We present results of optical spectroscopic observations of candidates of Lyman Break Galaxies (LBGs) at $z sim 5$ in the region including the GOODS-N and the J0053+1234 region by using GMOS-N and GMOS-S, respectively. Among 25 candidates, five objects are identified to be at $z sim 5$ (two of them were already identified by an earlier study) and one object very close to the color-selection window turned out to be a foreground galaxy. With this spectroscopically identified sample and those from previous studies, we derived the lower limits on the number density of bright ($M_{UV}<-22.0$ mag) LBGs at $z sim 5$. These lower limits are comparable to or slightly smaller than the number densities of UV luminosity functions (UVLFs) that show the smaller number density among $z sim 5$ UVLFs in literature. However, by considering that there remain many LBG candidates without spectroscopic observations, the number density of bright LBGs is expected to increase by a factor of two or more. The evidence for the deficiency of UV luminous LBGs with large Ly$alpha$ equivalent widths was reinforced. We discuss possible causes for the deficiency and prefer the interpretation of dust absorption.
We explore from a statistical point of view the far-infrared (far-IR) and sub-millimeter (sub-mm) properties of a large sample of LBGs (22,000) at z~3 in the COSMOS field. The large number of galaxies allows us to split it in several bins as a function of UV luminosity, UV slope, and stellar mass to better sample their variety. We perform stacking analysis in PACS (100 and 160 um), SPIRE (250, 350 and 500 um) and AzTEC (1.1 mm) images. Our stacking procedure corrects the biases induced by galaxy clustering and incompleteness of our input catalogue in dense regions. We obtain the full IR spectral energy distributions (SED) of subsamples of LBGs and derive the mean IR luminosity as a function of UV luminosity, UV slope, and stellar mass. The average IRX is roughly constant over the UV luminosity range, with a mean of 7.9 (1.8 mag). However, it is correlated with UV slope, and stellar mass. We investigate using a statistically-controlled stacking analysis as a function of (stellar mass, UV slope) the dispersion of the IRX-UVslope and IRX-M* plane. Our results enable us to study the average relation between star-formation rate (SFR) and stellar mass, and we show that our LBG sample lies on the main sequence of star formation at z~3.
Ultraviolet (UV) galaxies have been selected from GALEX. The presence of a FUV-dropout in their spectral energy distributions proved to be a very complete (83.3%) but not very efficient (21.4%) tool for identifying Lyman Break Galaxies (LBGs) at z~1. We divide the LBG sample into two sub-classes: red LBGs (RLBGs) detected at 24 micron which are mainly Luminous IR Galaxies (LIRGs) and blue LBGs (BLBGs) undetected at 24 microns down to 83 microJy. Two of the RLBGs are also detected at 70 micron. The median SED of the RLBGs is similar (above lambda~1 micron) to the dusty starburst HR10. However, unlike local (U)LIRGs, RLBGs are UV bright objects. We suggest that these objects contain a large amount of dust but that some bare stellar populations are also directly visible. The median SED of the BLBGs is consistent with their containing the same stellar population as the RLBGs but with a lower dust content. The luminosity function of our LBG sample at z~1 is similar to the luminosity function of NUV-selected galaxies at the same redshift. The integrated luminosity densities of z~1 LBGs and NUV-selected galaxies are very consistent. We show that star formation rates (SFRs) estimated from UV measurements and corrected using the IRX-beta method provide average total SFR_TOT in agreement with SFR_UV + SFR_dust. However, IRX-beta-based SFR_TOT shows a large dispersion. Summing up the detected UV (1150A rest-frame) and IR-based star formation rates of the detected objects, we find that only one third of the total (i.e. UV + dust) LBG SFR resides in BLBGs and two thirds in RLBGs, even though most LBGs at z~1 are BLBGs. On the other hand, the total SFR of LBGs accounts for only 11% of the total SFR at z~1. Finally, we observe a regular decrease of L_TIR / L_FUV from z=0 to z~2 for UV-selected samples.
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