The nearby universe remains the best laboratory to understand physical properties of galaxies and is a reference for any comparison with high redshift observations. The all sky (or very large) surveys performed from the ultraviolet (UV) to the far-in
frared (far-IR) gives us large datasets with a very large wavelength coverage to perform a reference study. We want to investigate dust attenuation characteristics as well as star formation rate (SFR) calibrations on a sample of nearby galaxies observed over 13 bands from 0.15 to 160 microns. A sample of 363 galaxies is built from the AKARI /FIS all sky survey cross-correlated with SDSS and GALEX surveys. Broad band spectral energy distributions are fitted with the CIGALE code optimized to analyze variations in dust attenuation curves and SFR measurements and based on an energetic budget between the stellar and dust emission. Our galaxy sample is primarily selected in far-IR and mostly constituted of massive, actively star forming galaxies. There is some evidence for a dust attenuation law slightly steeper than that used for starburst galaxies but we are unable to constrain the presence or not of a bump at 220 nm. We confirm that a time dependent dust attenuation is necessary to perform the best fits. Various calibrations of the dust attenuation in the UV as a function of UV-optical colours are discussed. A calibration of the current star formation rate combining UV and total IR emissions is proposed with an accurate estimation of dust heating by old stars: for the whole sample 17 % of the total dust luminosity is not related to the recent star formation
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.
