No Arabic abstract
We provide a library of some 7000 SEDs (available at www.eso.org/~rsiebenm) for the nuclei of starburst and ultra luminous galaxies. Its purpose is to quickly obtain estimates of the basic parameters, such as luminosity, size and dust or gas mass and to predict the flux at yet unobserved wavelengths. The procedure is simple and consists of finding an element in the library that matches the observations. The objects may be in the local universe or at high z. We calculate the radiative transfer in spherical symmetry for a stellar cluster permeated by an interstellar medium with standard (Milky Way) dust properties. The cluster contains two stellar populations: old bulge stars and OB stars. Because the latter are young, a certain fraction of them will be embedded in compact clouds which constitute hot spots that determine the MIR fluxes. We present SEDs for a broad range of luminosities, sizes and obscurations. We argue that the assumption of spherical symmetry and the neglect of clumpiness of the medium are not severe shortcomings for computing the dust emission. The validity of the approach is demonstrated by matching the SED of seven of the best studied galaxies, including M82 and Arp220, by library elements. In all cases, one finds an element which fits the observed SED very well, and the parameters defining the element are in full accord with what is known about the galaxy from detailed studies. We also compare our method of computing SEDs with other techniques described in the literature.
We assume that dust near active galactic nuclei (AGN) is distributed in a torus-like geometry, which may be described by a clumpy medium or a homogeneous disk or as a combination of the two (i.e. a 2-phase medium). The dust particles considered are fluffy and have higher submillimeter emissivities than grains in the diffuse ISM. The dust-photon interaction is treated in a fully self-consistent three dimensional radiative transfer code. We provide an AGN library of spectral energy distributions (SEDs). Its purpose is to quickly obtain estimates of the basic parameters of the AGN, such as the intrinsic luminosity of the central source, the viewing angle, the inner radius, the volume filling factor and optical depth of the clouds, and the optical depth of the disk midplane, and to predict the flux at yet unobserved wavelengths. The procedure is simple and consists of finding an element in the library that matches the observations. We discuss the general properties of the models and in particular the 10mic. silicate band. The AGN library accounts well for the observed scatter of the feature strengths and wavelengths of the peak emission. AGN extinction curves are discussed and we find that there is no direct one-to-one link between the observed extinction and the wavelength dependence of the dust cross sections. We show that objects of the library cover the observed range of mid IR colors of known AGN. The validity of the approach is demonstrated by matching the SEDs of a number of representative objects: Four Seyferts and two quasars for which we present new Herschel photometry, two radio galaxies, and one hyperluminous infrared galaxy. Strikingly, for the five luminous objects we find pure AGN models fit the SED without a need to postulate starburst activity.
Galactic nuclei often harbor a disproportionately large amount of star formation activity with respect to their surrounding disks. Not coincidentally, the density of molecular material in galactic nuclei is often also much greater than that in disks (Table 1 in Kennicutt 1998). The interplay between rich populations of young stars and dense molecular environments is evident in our own Galactic center, which hosts over 10% of Galactic star formation activity within only $<$0.1% of the volume of the Galactic disk. Data obtained with the VLA and HST reveal a variety of star forming sites in the Galactic Center, including a substantial population of stars that are formed in very dense and massive clusters, while other stars are formed in somewhat sparsely populated associations of massive stars. Indeed, three of the stellar clusters are the most massive and densest in the Galaxy. In this paper, we discuss the Galactic center environment and its compact young star clusters, and compare them to their counterparts in star forming galactic nuclei, concluding that dense molecular environments and large velocity dispersions combine to alter star formation activity in both cases, particularly as regards massive young clusters.
Over the past few years ALMA has detected dust-rich galaxies whose cold dust emission is spatially disconnected from the UV rest-frame emission. This represents a challenge for modeling their spectral energy distributions with codes based on an energy budget between the stellar and dust components. We want to verify the validity of energy balance modeling on a sample of galaxies observed from the UV to the sub-millimeter rest frame with ALMA and decipher what information can be reliably retrieved from the analysis of the full SED and from subsets of wavelengths. We select 17 sources at z~2 in the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field and in the GOODS- South field detected with ALMA and Herschel and for which UV to NIR. rest-frame ancillary data are available. We fit the data with CIGALE exploring different configurations for dust attenuation and star formation histories, considering either the full dataset or one that is reduced to the stellar and dust emission. We compare estimates of the dust luminosities, star formation rates, and stellar masses. The fit of the stellar continuum alone with the starburst attenuation law can only reproduce up to 50% of the total dust luminosity observed by Herschel and ALMA. This deficit is found to be consistent with similar quantities estimated in the COSMOS field and is found to increase with the specific star formation rate. The combined stellar and dust SEDs are well fitted when different attenuation laws are introduced. Shallow attenuation curves are needed for the galaxies whose cold dust distribution is very compact compared to starlight. The stellar mass estimates are affected by the choice of the attenuation law. The star formation rates are robustly estimated as long as dust luminosities are available. The large majority of the galaxies are above the average main sequence of star forming galaxies and one source is a strong starburst.
The Planck and Herschel missions are currently measuring the farIR-mm emission of dust, which combined with existing IR data, will for the first time provide the full SED of the galactic ISM dust emission with an unprecedented sensitivity and angular resolution. It will allow a systematic study of the dust evolution processes that affect the SED. Here we present a versatile numerical tool, DustEM, that predicts the emission and extinction of dust given their size distribution and their optical and thermal properties. In order to model dust evolution, DustEM has been designed to deal with a variety of grain types, structures and size distributions and to be able to easily include new dust physics. We use DustEM to model the dust SED and extinction in the diffuse interstellar medium at high-galactic latitude (DHGL), a natural reference SED. We present a coherent set of observations for the DHGL SED. The dust components in our DHGL model are (i) PAHs, (ii) amorphous carbon and (iii) amorphous silicates. We use amorphous carbon dust, rather than graphite, because it better explains the observed high abundances of gas-phase carbon in shocked regions of the interstellar medium. Using the DustEM model, we illustrate how, in the optically thin limit, the IRAS/Planck HFI (and likewise Spitzer/Herschel for smaller spatial scales) photometric band ratios of the dust SED can disentangle the influence of the exciting radiation field intensity and constrain the abundance of small grains relative to the larger grains. We also discuss the contributions of the different grain populations to the IRAS, Planck and Herschel channels. Such information is required to enable a study of the evolution of dust as well as to systematically extract the dust thermal emission from CMB data and to analyze the emission in the Planck polarized channels. The DustEM code described in this paper is publically available.
We combine the the stellar spectral synthesis code Starburst99, the nebular modelling code MAPPINGSIII, and a 1-D dynamical evolution model of HII regions around massive clusters of young stars to generate improved models of the spectral energy distribution (SED) of starburst galaxies. We introduce a compactness parameter, C, which characterizes the specific intensity of the radiation field at ionization fronts in HII regions, and which controls the shape of the far-IR dust re-emission, often referred to loosely as the dust ``temperature. We also investigate the effect of metallicity on the overall SED and in particular, on the strength of the PAH features. We provide templates for the mean emission produced by the young compact HII regions, the older (10 - 100 Myr) stars and for the wavelength-dependent attenuation produced by a foreground screen of the dust used in our model. We demonstrate that these components may be combined to produce a excellent fit to the observed SEDs of star formation dominated galaxies which are often used as templates (Arp 220 and NGC 6240). This fit extends from the Lyman Limit to wavelengths of about one mm. The methods presented in both this paper and in the previous papers of this series allow the extraction of the physical parameters of the starburst region (star formation rates, star formation rate history, mean cluster mass, metallicity, dust attenuation and pressure) from the analysis of the pan-spectral SED.