The Opacity of Spiral Galaxy Disks VIII: Structure of the Cold ISM

TL;DR

This study compares emission-based and absorption-based methods to measure dust in spiral galaxy disks, providing insights into the small-scale structure of the cold interstellar medium and its impact on galaxy models.

Contribution

It introduces a combined approach using HST and Spitzer data to constrain the geometry of the cold ISM in spiral galaxies.

Findings

Measurements generally agree, indicating optically thin clouds.

Optically thick disks likely contain multiple clouds along the line-of-sight.

The methods help refine models of dust distribution and galaxy energy budgets.

Abstract

The quantity of dust in a spiral disk can be estimated using the dust's typical emission or the extinction of a known source. In this paper, we compare two techniques, one based on emission and one on absorption, applied on sections of fourteen disk galaxies. The two measurements reflect, respectively the average and apparent optical depth of a disk section. Hence, they depend differently on the average number and optical depth of ISM structures in the disk. The small scale geometry of the cold ISM is critical for accurate models of the overall energy budget of spiral disks. ISM geometry, relative contributions of different stellar populations and dust emissivity are all free parameters in galaxy Spectral Energy Distribution (SED) models; they are also sometimes degenerate, depending on wavelength coverage. Our aim is to constrain typical ISM geometry. The apparent optical depth measurement comes from the number of distant galaxies seen in HST images through the foreground disk. We measure the IR flux in images from the {\it Spitzer} Infrared Nearby Galaxy Survey in the same section of the disk that was covered by HST. A physical model of the dust is fit to the SED to estimate the dust surface density, mean temperature, and brightness in these disk sections. The surface density is subsequently converted into the average optical depth estimate. The two measurements generally agree. The ratios between the measured average and apparent optical depths of the disk sections imply optically thin clouds in these disks. Optically thick disks, are likely to have more than a single cloud along the line-of-sight.