An Aromatic Inventory of the Local Volume
A. R. Marble, C. W. Engelbracht, L. van Zee, D. A. Dale, J. D. T., Smith, K. D. Gordon, Y. Wu, J. C. Lee, R. C. Kennicutt, E. D. Skillman, L. C., Johnson, M. Block, D. Calzetti, S. A. Cohen, H. Lee, M. D. Schuster

TL;DR
This study develops a photometric method to inventory aromatic feature emission in local star-forming galaxies, enabling analysis of large samples without spectroscopy and revealing correlations with metallicity.
Contribution
It introduces a calibrated infrared photometric technique to measure aromatic emission, applicable to extensive galaxy samples lacking spectroscopic data.
Findings
The aromatic luminosity in the Local Volume is quantified as 2.47E10 solar luminosities.
A correlation exists between metallicity and aromatic to IR emission ratio.
The method achieves a 6% accuracy in recovering aromatic fractions from photometry.
Abstract
Using infrared photometry from the Spitzer Space Telescope, we perform the first inventory of aromatic feature emission (AFE, but also commonly referred to as PAH emission) for a statistically complete sample of star-forming galaxies in the local volume. The photometric methodology involved is calibrated and demonstrated to recover the aromatic fraction of the IRAC 8 micron flux with a standard deviation of 6% for a training set of 40 SINGS galaxies (ranging from stellar to dust dominated) with both suitable mid-infrared Spitzer IRS spectra and equivalent photometry. A potential factor of two improvement could be realized with suitable 5.5 and 10 micron photometry, such as what may be provided in the future by JWST. The resulting technique is then applied to mid-infrared photometry for the 258 galaxies from the Local Volume Legacy (LVL) survey, a large sample dominated in number by…
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