Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): Dr Christopher HarrisonORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© ESO 2020.By using data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array and near-infrared (NIR) integral field spectrographs, including both Spectrograph for INtegral Field Observations in the Near Infrared and K-band Multi Object Spectrograph on the Very Large Telescope, we investigate the two-dimensional distributions of Hα and rest-frame far-infrared (FIR) continuum in six submillimeter galaxies (SMGs) at z ∼ 2. At a similar spatial resolution (∼0.5 FWHM; ∼4.5 kpc at z = 2), we find that the half-light radius of Hα is significantly larger than that of the FIR continuum in half of the sample, and on average Hα is a median factor of 2.0 ± 0.4 larger. Having explored various ways to correct for the attenuation, we find that the attenuation-corrected Hα-based star-formation rates (SFRs) are systematically lower than the infrared (IR)-based SFRs by at least a median factor of 3 ± 1, which cannot be explained by the difference in half-light radius alone. In addition, we find that in 40% of cases the total V-band attenuation (AV) derived from energy balance modeling of the full ultraviolet (UV)-to-FIR spectral energy distributions (SEDs) is significantly higher than what is derived from SED modeling using only the UV-to-NIR part of the SEDs, and the discrepancy appears to increase with increasing total infrared luminosity. Finally, in considering all of our findings along with the studies in the literature, we postulate that the dust distributions in SMGs, and possibly also in less IR luminous z ∼ 2 massive star-forming galaxies, can be decomposed into the following three main components: the diffuse dust heated by older stellar populations, the more obscured and extended young star-forming H II regions, and the heavily obscured central regions that have a low filling factor but dominate the infrared luminosity in which the majority of attenuation cannot be probed via UV-to-NIR emissions.
Author(s): Chen C-C, Harrison CM, Smail I, Swinbank AM, Turner OJ, Wardlow JL, Brandt WN, Calistro Rivera G, Chapman SC, Cooke EA, Dannerbauer H, Dunlop JS, Farrah D, Michalowski MJ, Schinnerer E, Simpson JM, Thomson AP, Van Der Werf PP
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Astronomy and Astrophysics
Year: 2020
Volume: 635
Online publication date: 18/03/2020
Acceptance date: 05/02/2020
Date deposited: 07/03/2022
ISSN (print): 0004-6361
ISSN (electronic): 1432-0746
Publisher: EDP Sciences
URL: https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201936286
DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201936286
Altmetrics provided by Altmetric
