English

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) luminous galaxies in JWST CEERS data

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2024-01-03 v1 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics

Abstract

It has been an unanswered question how many dusty galaxies have been undetected from the state-of-the-art observational surveys. JWST enables us to detect faint IR galaxies that have prominent polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) features in the mid-IR wavelengths. PAH is a valuable tracer of star formation and dust properties in the mid-infrared wavelength. The JWST Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) fields provide us with wavelength coverage from 7.7 to 21 μ\mum using six photometric bands of the mid-infrared instrument (MIRI). We have identified galaxies dominated by mid-IR emission from PAHs, termed PAH galaxies. From our multi-band photometry catalogue, we selected ten PAH galaxies displaying high flux ratios of log(S15/S10)>0.8\log(S_{15}/S_{10}) > 0.8. The SED fitting analysis indicates that these galaxies are star-forming galaxies with total IR luminosities of 101010^{10} \sim 1011.510^{11.5} LL_{\odot} at z 1\sim 1. The morphology of PAH galaxies does not show any clear signatures of major merging or interaction within the MIRI resolution. The majority of them are on the star-formation main sequence at z1z \sim 1. Our result demonstrates that JWST can detect PAH emissions from normal star-forming galaxies at z1z \sim 1, in addition to ultra-luminous infrared galaxies (ULIRGs) or luminous infrared galaxies (LIRGs).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2401.01043,
  title  = {Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) luminous galaxies in JWST CEERS data},
  author = {Yu-Wei Lin and Cossas K. -W. Wu and Chih-Teng Ling and Tomotsugu Goto and Seong Jin Kim and Ece Kilerci and Tetsuya Hashimoto and Po-Ya Wang and Simon C. -C. Ho and Tiger Yu-Yang Hsiao and Bjorn Jasper R. Raquel and Yuri Uno},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.01043},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

12 pages, 20 figures, 4 tables. Accepted by MNRAS. A summary video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtPaVTFM4f8&ab_channel=NTHUCosmology