We investigate the connection between dust and gas in the nearby edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 891, a target of the Very Nearby Galaxies Survey. High resolution Herschel PACS and SPIRE 70, 100, 160, 250, 350, and 500 μm images are combined with JCMT SCUBA 850 μm observations to trace the far-infrared/submillimetre spectral energy distribution (SED). Maps of the Hi 21 cm line and CO(J = 3−2) emission trace the atomic and molecular hydrogen gas, respectively. We fit one-component modified blackbody models to the integrated SED, finding a global dust mass of (8.5 ± 2.0) × 10 7 M and an average temperature of 23 ± 2 K, consistent with results from previous far-infrared experiments. We also fit one-component modified blackbody models to pixel-by-pixel SEDs to produce maps of the dust mass and temperature. The dust mass distribution correlates with the total stellar population as traced by the 3.6 μm emission. The derived dust temperature, which ranges from approximately 17 to 24 K, is found to correlate with the 24 μm emission. Allowing the dust emissivity index to vary, we find an average value of β = 1.9±0.3. We confirm an inverse relation between the dust emissivity spectral index and dust temperature, but do not observe any variation of this relationship with vertical height from the mid-plane of the disc. A comparison of the dust properties with the gaseous components of the ISM reveals strong spatial correlations between the surface mass densities of dust (Σ dust ) and the molecular hydrogen (Σ H 2 ) and total gas surface densities (Σ gas ). These observations reveal the presence of regions of dense, cold dust that are coincident with peaks in the gas distribution and are associated with a molecular ring. Furthermore, the observed asymmetries in the dust temperature, the H 2 -to-dust ratio and the total gas-to-dust ratio hint that an enhancement in the star formation rate may be the result of larger quantities of molecular gas available to fuel star formation in the NE compared to the SW. Whilst the asymmetry likely arises from dust obscuration due to the geometry of the line-of-sight projection of the spiral arms, we cannot exclude that there is also an enhancement in the star formation rate in the NE part of the disc.
Context. Edge-on spiral galaxies with prominent dust lanes provide us with an excellent opportunity to study the distribution and properties of the dust within them. The HEROES project was set up to observe a sample of seven large edge-on galaxies across various wavelengths for this investigation. Aims. Within this first paper, we present the Herschel observations and perform a qualitative and quantitative analysis on them, and we derive some global properties of the far infrared and submillimetre emission. Methods. We determine horizontal and vertical profiles from the Herschel observations of the galaxies in the sample and describe the morphology. Modified black-body fits to the global fluxes, measured using aperture photometry, result in dust temperatures and dust masses. The latter values are compared to those that are derived from radiative transfer models taken from the literature. Results. On the whole, our Herschel flux measurements agree well with archival values. We find that the exponential horizontal dust distribution model often used in the literature generally provides a good description of the observed horizontal profiles. Three out of the seven galaxies show signatures of extended vertical emission at 100 and 160 μm at the 5σ level, but in two of these it is probably due to deviations from an exactly edge-on orientation. Only for NGC 4013, a galaxy in which vertically extended dust has already been detected in optical images, we can detect vertically extended dust, and the derived scaleheight agrees with the value estimated through radiative transfer modelling. Our analysis hints at a correlation between the dust scaleheight and its degree of clumpiness, which we infer from the difference between the dust masses as calculated from modelling of optical data and from fitting the spectral energy distribution of Herschel datapoints.
We present results of the detailed dust energy balance study for the seven large edge-on galaxies in the HEROES sample using 3D radiative transfer (RT) modelling. Based on available optical and near-infrared observations of the HEROES galaxies, we derive the 3D distribution of stars and dust in these galaxies. For the sake of uniformity, we apply the same technique to retrieve galaxy properties for the entire sample: we use a stellar model consisting of a Sérsic bulge and three double-exponential discs (a superthin disc for a young stellar population and thin and thick discs for old populations). For the dust component, we adopt a double-exponential disc with the new THEMIS dust-grain model. We fit oligochromatic radiative transfer (RT) models to the optical and near-infrared images with the fitting algorithm fitskirt and do panchromatic simulations with the skirt code at wavelengths ranging from ultraviolet to submillimeter. We confirm the previously stated dust energy balance problem in galaxies: for the HEROES galaxies, the dust emission derived from our RT calculations underestimates the real observations by a factor 1.5-4 for all galaxies except NGC 973 and NGC 5907 (apparently, the latter galaxy has a more complex geometry than we used). The comparison between our RT simulations and the observations at mid-infrared-submillimeter wavelengths shows that most of our galaxies exhibit complex dust morphologies (possible spiral arms, star-forming regions, more extended dust structure in the radial and vertical directions). We suggest that, in agreement with the results from Saftly et al. (2015), the large-and small-scale structure is the most probable explanation for the dust energy balance problem.
We investigate the dust energy balance for the edge-on galaxy IC 2531, 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 IC 2531 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.
Recent cosmological hydrodynamical simulations suggest that baryonic processes, and in particular supernova feedback following bursts of star formation, can alter the structure of dark matter haloes and transform primordial cusps into shallower cores. To assess whether this mechanism offers a solution to the long-standing cusp-core controversy, simulated haloes must be compared to real dark matter haloes inferred from galaxy rotation curves. For this purpose, two new dark matter density profiles were recently derived from simulations of galaxies in complementary mass ranges: the DC14 halo (10 10 < M halo /M < 8 × 10 11 ) and the coreNFW halo (10 7 < M halo /M < 10 9 ). Both models have individually been found to give good fits to observed rotation curves. For the DC14 model, however, the agreement of the predicted halo properties with cosmological scaling relations was confirmed by one study, but strongly refuted by another. A next important question is whether, despite their different approaches, the two models converge to the same solution in the mass range where both should be appropriate. To investigate this, we tested the DC14 and coreNFW halo models on the rotation curves of a selection of galaxies with halo masses in the range 4 × 10 9 M -7 × 10 10 M and compared their predictions. We further applied the DC14 model to a set of rotation curves at higher halo masses, up to 9 × 10 11 M , to verify the agreement with the cosmological scaling relations. Both models are generally able to reproduce the observed rotation curves, in line with earlier results, and the predicted dark matter haloes are consistent with the cosmological c − M halo and M * − M halo relations. We find that the DC14 and coreNFW models are also in fairly good agreement with each other, even though DC14 tends to predict slightly less extended cores and somewhat more concentrated haloes than coreNFW. While the quality of the fits is generally similar for both halo models, DC14 does perform significantly better than coreNFW for three galaxies. In each of these cases, the problem for coreNFW is related to connection of the core size to the stellar half-mass radius, although we argue that it is justifiable to relax this connection for NGC 3741. A larger core radius brings the coreNFW model for this galaxy in good agreement with the data and the DC14 model.
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