HERschel Observations of Edge-on Spirals (HEROES): III. Dust energy balance study of IC2531

We investigate the dust energy balance for the edge-on galaxy IC2531, one of the seven galaxies in the HEROES sample. We perform a state-of-the-art radiative transfer modelling based, for the first time, on a set of optical and near-infrared galaxy images. We show that by taking into account near-in...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Astronomy and astrophysics (Berlin) 2016-08, Vol.592
Main Authors: Mosenkov, Aleksandr V, Allaert, Flor, Baes, Maarten, Bianchi, Simone, Camps, Peter, De Geyter, Gert, De Looze, Ilse, Fritz, Jacopo, Gentile, Gianfranco, Hughes, Thomas M, Lewis, Fraser, Verstappen, Joris, Verstocken, Sam, Viaene, Sebastien
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Astronomical models
Dust
Galaxies
Mathematical models
Modelling
Parameters
Radiative transfer
Wavelengths
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Summary:We investigate the dust energy balance for the edge-on galaxy IC2531, one of the seven galaxies in the HEROES sample. We perform a state-of-the-art radiative transfer modelling based, for the first time, on a set of optical and near-infrared galaxy images. We show that by taking into account near-infrared imaging in the modelling significantly improves the constraints on the retrieved parameters of the dust content. We confirm the result from previous studies that including a young stellar population in the modelling is important to explain the observed stellar energy distribution. However, the discrepancy between the observed and modelled thermal emission at far-infrared wavelengths, the so-called dust energy balance problem, is still present: the model underestimates the observed fluxes by a factor of about two. We compare two different dust models, and find that dust parameters, and thus the spectral energy distribution in the infrared domain, are sensitive to the adopted dust model. In general, the THEMIS model reproduces the observed emission in the infrared wavelength domain better than the popular BARE-GR-S model. Our study of IC2531 is a pilot case for detailed and uniform radiative transfer modelling of the entire HEROES sample, which will shed more light on the strength and origins of the dust energy balance problem.
ISSN:0004-6361
1432-0746
DOI:10.1051/0004-6361/201628676