Dissecting Nearby Galaxies with piXedfit: I. Spatially Resolved Properties of Stars, Dust, and Gas as Revealed by Panchromatic SED Fitting

TL;DR

This study uses the piXedfit software to analyze spatially resolved properties of stars, dust, and gas in nearby galaxies through multi-band SED fitting, revealing insights into dust heating, star formation, and gas depletion.

Contribution

The paper introduces piXedfit for self-consistent, spatially resolved SED fitting across multiple wavelengths, enabling detailed analysis of galaxy components and their radial variations.

Findings

IRX–β relation is consistent with integrated photometry.

Old stars contribute significantly to dust heating.

Molecular gas depletion correlates with suppressed star formation.

Abstract

We study spatially resolved properties (on spatial scales of $\sim 1-2$ kpc out to at least $3$ effective radii) of the stars, dust, and gas in ten nearby spiral galaxies. The properties of the stellar population and dust are derived by fitting the spatially resolved spectral energy distribution (SED) with more than 20 photometric bands ranging from far-ultraviolet to far-infrared. Our newly developed software piXedfit performs point spread function matching of images, pixel binning, and models the stellar light, dust attenuation, dust emission, and emission from a dusty torus heated by an active galactic nucleus simultaneously through the energy balance approach. With this self-consistent analysis, we present the spatially resolved version of the IRX--$\beta$ relation, finding that it is consistent with the relationship from the integrated photometry. We show that the old stellar populations contribute to the dust heating, which causes an overestimation of star formation rate (SFR) derived from the total ultraviolet and infrared luminosities on kpc scales. With archival high-resolution maps of atomic and molecular gas, we study the radial variation of the properties of the stellar populations (including stellar mass, age, metallicity, and SFR), dust (including dust mass, dust temperature, and abundance of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon), gas, as well as dust-to-stellar mass and dust-to-gas mass ratios. We observe a depletion of molecular gas mass fraction in the central region of the majority of the galaxies, suggesting that the lack of available fuel is an important factor in suppressing the specific SFR at the center.