Star formation and dust extinction properties of local galaxies from AKARI-GALEX All-Sky Surveys: First results from most secure multiband sample from FUV to FIR

TL;DR

This study analyzes the star formation and dust extinction in 607 local galaxies using multiwavelength data from AKARI, GALEX, SDSS, and 2MASS, revealing how infrared luminosity relates to galaxy properties and star formation activity.

Contribution

It provides new formulae to convert FIR luminosity to total IR luminosity and explores the relationship between dust attenuation, stellar mass, and star formation rates in local galaxies.

Findings

More luminous at 90um have redder SEDs.

The color-magnitude distribution centers on the green valley.

L_TIR dominates star formation activity even when considering dust heating by old stars.

Abstract

The AKARI All-Sky Survey provided the first bright point source catalog detected at 90um. Starting from this catalog, we selected galaxies by matching AKARI sources with those in the IRAS PSCz. Next, we have measured total GALEX FUV and NUV flux densities. Then, we have matched this sample with SDSS and 2MASS galaxies. By this procedure, we obtained the final sample which consists of 607 galaxies. If we sort the sample with respect to 90um, their average SED shows a coherent trend: the more luminous at 90um, the redder the global SED becomes. The M_r--NUV-r color-magnitude relation of our sample does not show bimodality, and the distribution is centered on the green valley between the blue cloud and red sequence seen in optical surveys. We have established formulae to convert FIR luminosity from AKARI bands to the total infrared (IR) luminosity L_TIR. With these formulae, we calculated the star formation directly visible with FUV and hidden by dust. The luminosity related to star formation activity (L_SF) is dominated by L_TIR even if we take into account the far-infrared (FIR) emission from dust heated by old stars. At high star formation rate (SFR) (> 20 Msun yr^-1), the fraction of directly visible SFR, SFR_FUV, decreases. We also estimated the FUV attenuation A_FUV from FUV-to-total IR (TIR) luminosity ratio. We also examined the L_TIR/L_FUV-UV slope (FUV- NUV) relation. The majority of the sample has L_TIR/L_FUV ratios 5 to 10 times lower than expected from the local starburst relation, while some LIRGs and all the ULIRGs of this sample have higher L_TIR/L_FUV ratios. We found that the attenuation indicator L_TIR/L_FUV is correlated to the stellar mass of galaxies, M*, but there is no correlation with specific SFR (SSFR), SFR/M*, and dust attenuation L_TIR/L_FUV. (abridged)