An investigation of the star-forming main sequence considering the nebular continuum emission at low-z

TL;DR

This study assesses how nebular continuum emission affects galaxy property estimates and finds that, for SDSS star-forming galaxies, including nebular contribution does not significantly alter star formation rate or stellar mass calculations.

Contribution

The paper demonstrates that modeling nebular continuum emission has negligible impact on SFR and stellar mass estimates for normal star-forming galaxies at low redshift.

Findings

Nebular contribution has minimal effect on SFR estimates from Hα luminosity.

Stellar mass estimates are slightly higher when nebular emission is modeled, but differences are negligible.

The star-forming main sequence remains consistent regardless of nebular contribution modeling.

Abstract

The code FADO is the first publicly available population spectral synthesis tool that treats the contribution from ionised gas to the observed emission self-consistently. We study the impact of the nebular contribution on the determination of the star formation rate (SFR), stellar mass, and consequent effect on the star-forming main sequence (SFMS) at low redshift. We applied FADO to the spectral database of the SDSS to derive the physical properties of galaxies. As a comparison, we used the data in the MPA-JHU catalogue, which contains the properties of SDSS galaxies derived without the nebular contribution. We selected a sample of SF galaxies with H$\alpha$ and H$\beta$ flux measurements, and we corrected the fluxes for the nebular extinction through the Balmer decrement. We then calculated the H$\alpha$ luminosity to estimate the SFR. Then, by combining the stellar mass and SFR estimates from FADO and MPA-JHU, the SFMS was obtained. The H$\alpha$ flux estimates are similar between FADO and MPA-JHU. Because the H$\alpha$ flux was used as tracer of the SFR, FADO and MPA-JHU agree in their SFR. The stellar mass estimates are slightly higher for FADO than for MPA-JHU on average. However, considering the uncertainties, the differences are negligible. With similar SFR and stellar mass estimates, the derived SFMS is also similar between FADO and MPA-JHU. Our results show that for SDSS normal SF galaxies, the additional modelling of the nebular contribution does not affect the retrieved fluxes and consequentially also does not influence SFR estimators based on the extinction-corrected H$\alpha$ luminosity. For the stellar masses, the results point to the same conclusion. These results are a consequence of the fact that the vast majority of normal SF galaxies in the SDSS have a low nebular contribution.