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Title: Dissecting Nearby Galaxies with piXedfit. I. Spatially Resolved Properties of Stars, Dust, and Gas as Revealed by Panchromatic SED Fitting

Journal Article · · The Astrophysical Journal
ORCiD logo [1]; ORCiD logo [1]; ORCiD logo [1]; ORCiD logo [2]; ORCiD logo [3]; ORCiD logo [4]; ORCiD logo [5]; ORCiD logo [6]
  1. Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica, Taipei (Taiwan)
  2. Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD (United States)
  3. Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), Ulsan (Korea, Republic of)
  4. Tohoku University, Sendai (Japan)
  5. Nagoya University (Japan); Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Tokyo (Japan)
  6. Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica, Taipei (Taiwan); National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Tokyo (Japan)

We study spatially resolved properties (on spatial scales of ~1–2 kpc out to at least 3 effective radii) of the stars, dust, and gas in 10 nearby spiral galaxies. The properties of the stellar population and dust are derived by fitting the spatially resolved spectral energy distribution (SED) with more than 20 photometric bands ranging from far-ultraviolet to far-infrared. Our newly developed software piXedfit performs point-spread function matching of images, pixel binning, and models the stellar light, dust attenuation, dust emission, and emission from a dusty torus heated by an active galactic nucleus simultaneously through the energy-balance approach. With this self-consistent analysis, we present the spatially resolved version of the IRX–βrelation, finding that it is consistent with the relationship from the integrated photometry. We show that the old stellar populations contribute to the dust heating, which causes an overestimation of the star formation rate (SFR) derived from the total ultraviolet and infrared luminosities on kiloparsec scales. With archival high-resolution maps of atomic and molecular gas, we study the radial variation of the properties of the stellar populations (including stellar mass, age, metallicity, and SFR), dust (including dust mass, dust temperature, and abundance of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon), and gas, as well as dust-to-stellar mass and dust-to-gas mass ratios. We observe a depletion of the molecular gas mass fraction in the central region of the majority of the galaxies, suggesting that the lack of available fuel is an important factor in suppressing the specific SFR at the center.

Research Organization:
Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica, Taipei (Taiwan)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC); National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA); Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
OSTI ID:
1983218
Journal Information:
The Astrophysical Journal, Journal Name: The Astrophysical Journal Journal Issue: 1 Vol. 926; ISSN 0004-637X
Publisher:
IOP PublishingCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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