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Published October 1, 2017 | Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

Calibration of Ultraviolet, Mid-infrared, and Radio Star Formation Rate Indicators

Abstract

We present calibrations for star formation rate (SFR) indicators in the ultraviolet, mid-infrared, and radio-continuum bands, including one of the first direct calibrations of 150 MHz as an SFR indicator. Our calibrations utilize 66 nearby star-forming galaxies with Balmer-decrement-corrected luminosities, which span five orders of magnitude in SFR and have absolute magnitudes of -24 < M_r < -12. Most of our photometry and spectrophotometry are measured from the same region of each galaxy, and our spectrophotometry has been validated with SDSS photometry, so our random and systematic errors are small relative to the intrinsic scatter seen in SFR indicator calibrations. We find that the Wide-field Infrared Space Explorer W4 (22.8 μm), Spitzer 24 μm, and 1.4 GHz bands have tight correlations with the Balmer-decrement-corrected Hα luminosity, with a scatter of only 0.2 dex. Our calibrations are comparable to those from the prior literature for L* galaxies, but for dwarf galaxies, our calibrations can give SFRs that are far greater than those derived from most previous literature.

Additional Information

© 2017 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2016 November 24; revised 2017 August 5; accepted 2017 August 31; published 2017 October 3. M.J.I.B. acknowledges financial support from The Australian Research Council (FT100100280), the Monash Research Accelerator Program (MRA), the Monash Outside Studies Programme (OSP), and the University of Cambridge. Part of this work was undertaken while M.J.I.B. was on OSP (sabbatical) leave at the University of Cambridge, Swinburne University, and the University of Melbourne. M.B. was supported by the MINEDUC-UA project, code ANT 1655. This work is based in part on observations made with the Spitzer Space Telescope, obtained from the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive, both of which are operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This publication makes use of data products from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which is a joint project of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. We gratefully acknowledge NASA's support for construction, operation, and science analysis for the GALEX mission, developed in cooperation with the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales of France and the Korean Ministry of Science and Technology. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. This research is based in part on observations taken with the telescopes of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. We would like to thank the TIFR GMRT Sky Survey team for planning and carrying out the original observations, and we offer special thanks to the GMRT staff for their ongoing support. GMRT is run by the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. Funding for SDSS-III has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. The SDSS-III Web site is http://www.sdss3.org/. SDSS-III is managed by the Astrophysical Research Consortium for the Participating Institutions of the SDSS-III Collaboration including the University of Arizona, the Brazilian Participation Group, Brookhaven National Laboratory, University of Cambridge, University of Florida, the French Participation Group, the German Participation Group, the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, the Michigan State/Notre Dame/JINA Participation Group, Johns Hopkins University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, New Mexico State University, New York University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, University of Portsmouth, Princeton University, the Spanish Participation Group, University of Tokyo, University of Utah, Vanderbilt University, University of Virginia, University of Washington, and Yale University. The NASA-Sloan Atlas was created by Michael Blanton, with extensive help and testing from Eyal Kazin, Guangtun Zhu, Adrian Price-Whelan, John Moustakas, Demitri Muna, Renbin Yan, and Benjamin Weaver. Funding for the NASA-Sloan Atlas has been provided by the NASA Astrophysics Data Analysis Program (08-ADP08-0072) and the NSF (AST-1211644). Facilities: Bok (Boller & Chivens spectrograph) - , CTIO:1.5m (R-C spectrograph) - , GMRT - , Sloan - , Spitzer (IRAC - , IRS - , MIPS) - , VLA - , WISE - .

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Published - Brown_2017_ApJ_847_136.pdf

Submitted - 1709.00183.pdf

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Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 17, 2023