Revisiting stellar properties of star-forming galaxies with stellar and nebular spectral modelling

TL;DR

This study compares stellar property estimates of star-forming galaxies obtained through spectral modelling with and without nebular emission, revealing significant differences especially in highly star-forming galaxies, impacting galaxy evolution interpretations.

Contribution

It demonstrates the importance of including nebular emission in spectral synthesis to accurately determine galaxy properties, highlighting discrepancies with purely stellar models.

Findings

Differences up to 0.12 dex in metallicity between codes for star-forming galaxies.

STARLIGHT underestimates ages and overestimates metallicities in highly star-forming galaxies.

Including nebular emission improves the accuracy of stellar property estimates.

Abstract

Spectral synthesis is a powerful tool for interpreting the physical properties of galaxies by decomposing their spectral energy distributions into the main luminosity contributors (e.g. stellar populations or ionised gas). However, the impact nebular emission has on the inferred properties of star-forming (SF) galaxies has been largely overlooked over the years. The objective of this work is to estimate the relations between stellar properties of SF galaxies from SDSS DR7 by simultaneously fitting the stellar and nebular continua with FADO and comparing them to the results derived using STARLIGHT, a representative of purely stellar population synthesis codes. Differences between codes regarding average mass, mean age and mean metallicity values can go as high as $\sim$0.06 dex for the overall population of galaxies and $\sim$0.12 dex for SF galaxies (galaxies with EW(H$\alpha$)>3 \AA), with the most prominent difference between both codes in the light-weighted mean stellar age. A closer look into the average light- and mass-weighted star formation histories of intensively SF galaxies (EW(H$\alpha$)>75 \AA) suggests that STARLIGHT is underestimating the average light-weighted age of intensively SF galaxies by up to $\sim$0.17 dex and overestimating the light-weighted metallicity by up to $\sim$0.13 dex compared to FADO (or vice versa). The comparison between the average stellar properties of passive, SF and intensively SF galaxy samples also reveals that differences between codes increase with increasing EW(H$\alpha$) and decreasing total stellar mass. This work finds indirect evidence that a purely stellar population synthesis approach negatively impacts the inferred stellar properties of galaxies with relatively high star formation rates. In turn, this can bias interpretations of fundamental relations such as the mass-age or mass-metallicity.