Dust energy balance study of two edge-on spiral galaxies in the Herschel-ATLAS survey

TL;DR

This study investigates the dust energy balance in two edge-on spiral galaxies, revealing a discrepancy in one case and a good model fit in the other, highlighting the complexity of dust heating mechanisms.

Contribution

It compares radiative transfer models constrained by optical data with far-infrared observations, emphasizing the role of young stars and exploring reasons for energy balance discrepancies.

Findings

IC4225's model underestimates far-infrared flux by a factor of three.

NGC5166's model matches observations well.

Different results suggest multiple mechanisms affect dust energy balance.

Abstract

Interstellar dust in galaxies can be traced either through its extinction effects on the star light, or through its thermal emission at infrared wavelengths. Recent radiative transfer studies of several nearby edge-on galaxies have found an apparent inconsistency in the dust energy balance: the radiative transfer models that successfully explain the optical extinction underestimate the observed fluxes by an average factor of three. We investigate the dust energy balance for IC4225 and NGC5166, two edge-on spiral galaxies observed by the Herschel Space Observatory in the frame of the H-ATLAS survey. We start from models which were constrained from optical data and extend them to construct the entire spectral energy distribution of our galaxies. These predicted values are subsequently compared to the observed far-infrared fluxes. We find that including a young stellar population in the modelling is necessary as it plays a non-negligible part in the heating of the dust grains. While the modelling approach for both galaxies is nearly identical, we find two very different results. As is often seen in other edge-on spiral galaxies, the far-infrared emission of our radiative transfer model of IC4225 underestimates the observed fluxes by a factor of about three. For NGC5166 on the other hand, we find that both the predicted spectral energy distribution as well as the simulated images match the observations particularly well. We explore possible reasons for this difference and conclude that it is unlikely that one single mechanism is the cause of the dust energy balance problem in spiral galaxies. We discuss the different approaches that can be considered in order to get a conclusive answer on the origin this discrepancy.