Panchromatic radiative transfer modeling of stars and dust in the Sombrero galaxy

TL;DR

This study models the dust and stellar components of the Sombrero galaxy using radiative transfer, revealing the necessity of a young stellar population and clumpy dust to explain infrared emission.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive radiative transfer model that incorporates young stars and a clumpy dust structure to resolve the dust energy balance discrepancy in the galaxy.

Findings

Standard model underestimates infrared dust emission by a factor of ~3.

Adding young stars in the model accounts for emission below 100 μm.

Clumpy dust distribution explains the excess emission beyond 100 μm.

Abstract

We present a detailed study of the dust energy balance in the Sombrero galaxy M104. From a full radiative transfer analysis, including scattering, absorption and thermal re-emission, we construct models that can reproduce images at optical/near-infrared wavelengths, the observed stellar SED and the minor axis extinction profiles in the V and R_C band. A standard model, that contains only an old stellar population to heat the dust, underestimates the observations of dust emission at infrared wavelengths by a factor of ~ 3. Supplementing this basic model with a young stellar component of low star formation activity in both the inner disk (SFR ~ 0.21 Msun/yr) and dust ring (SFR ~ 0.05 Msun/yr), we are capable of solving the discrepancy in the dust energy budget of the Sombrero galaxy at wavelengths shortwards of 100 \mum. To account for the increased FIR/submm emission beyond 100 \mum, we propose a additional dust component distributed in quiescent clumps. This model with a clumpy dust structure predicts three-quarters of the total dust content (~ 2.8 x 10^7 Msun) to reside in compact dust clouds with no associated embedded sources. Although the assumption of a clumpy dust structure in the Sombrero galaxy is supported by high-resolution optical data, we cannot rule out the possibility that dust grains with a higher dust emissivity account for part of the discrepancy in the energy budget at submm wavelengths.