Dissecting Galaxy Colors with GALEX, SDSS, and Spitzer
Abstract
We combine data from SDSS and the GALEX and Spitzer observatories to create a sample of galaxies observed homogeneously from the UV to the Far-IR. This sample, consisting of ~460 galaxies observed spectroscopically by SDSS provides a multiwavelength (0.15-24 micron) view of obscured and unobscured star formation in nearby (z<0.3) galaxies with SFRs ranging from 0.01 to 100 M_solar/yr. We calculate a robust dust measure from the infrared to UV ratio (IRX) and explore the influence of star formation history (SFH) on the dust-UV color relation (i.e. the IRX-beta relation). We find that the UV colors of galaxies are only weakly dependent on their SFH as measured by the 4000A break. However, we find that the contributions of dust and SFH are distinguishable when colors at widely separated wavelengths (e.g. 0.23-3.6 micron) are introduced. We show this explicitly by recasting the IRX-beta relation as a more general IRX-SFH-color relation, which we examine in different projections. We also determine simple fits to this relation.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0605473,
title = {Dissecting Galaxy Colors with GALEX, SDSS, and Spitzer},
author = {B. D. Johnson and D. Schiminovich and M. Seibert and M. A. Treyer and S. Charlot and T. M. Heckman and D. C. Martin and S. Salim and G. Kauffmann and L. Bianchi and J. Donas and P. G. Friedman and Y. -W. Lee and B. F. Madore and B. Milliard and P. Morrissey and S. G. Neff and R. M. Rich and A. S. Szalay and K. Forster and T. A. Barlow and T. Conrow and T. Small and T. K. Wyder},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0605473},
year = {2014}
}
Comments
4 pages, 3 figures, accepted by ApJ Letters