Spectral Synthesis of Star-forming Galaxies in the Near-Infrared

TL;DR

This study uses near-infrared spectral analysis to identify stellar populations in star-forming galaxies, testing models of TP-AGB stars and assessing the effectiveness of NIR spectral indexes in tracing star formation.

Contribution

It provides a homogeneous analysis of 23 star-forming galaxies, evaluating the practical use of NIR spectral indexes and testing stellar population synthesis models for TP-AGB stars.

Findings

Young/intermediate populations dominate in NIR-bright galaxies.

Older galaxies show less contribution from young populations.

NIR spectral indexes have limited practical use due to observational challenges.

Abstract

The near-infrared spectral region is becoming a very useful wavelength range to detect and quantify the stellar population of galaxies. Models are developing to predict the contribution of TP-AGB stars, that should dominate the NIR spectra of populations 0.3 to 2 Gyr old. When present in a given stellar population, these stars leave unique signatures that can be used to detect them unambiguously. However, these models have to be tested in a homogeneous database of star-forming galaxies, to check if the results are consistent with what is found from different wavelength ranges. In this work we performed stellar population synthesis on the nuclear and extended regions of 23 star-forming galaxies to understand how the star-formation tracers in the near-infrared can be used in practice. The stellar population synthesis shows that for the galaxies with strong emission in the NIR, there is an important fraction of young/intermediate population contributing to the spectra, which is probably the ionisation source in these galaxies. Galaxies that had no emission lines measured in the NIR were found to have older average ages and less contribution of young populations. Although the stellar population synthesis method proved to be very effective to find the young ionising population in these galaxies, no clear correlation between these results and the NIR spectral indexes were found. Thus, we believe that, in practice, the use of these indexes is still very limited due to observational limitations.