Welcome to the new version of CaltechAUTHORS. Login is currently restricted to library staff. If you notice any issues, please email coda@library.caltech.edu
Published April 2022 | Published + Supplemental Material + Accepted Version
Journal Article Open

Planetary nebula luminosity function distances for 19 galaxies observed by PHANGS–MUSE

Abstract

We provide new planetary nebula luminosity function (PNLF) distances to 19 nearby spiral galaxies that were observed with VLT/MUSE by the PHANGS collaboration. Emission line ratios are used to separate planetary nebulae (PNe) from other bright [OIII][OIII] emitting sources like compact supernovae remnants (SNRs) or H II regions. While many studies have used narrowband imaging for this purpose, the detailed spectral line information provided by integral field unit (IFU) spectroscopy grants a more robust way of categorizing different [OIII] emitters. We investigate the effects of SNR contamination on the PNLF and find that we would fail to classify all objects correctly, when limited to the same data narrowband imaging provides. However, the few misclassified objects usually do not fall on the bright end of the luminosity function, and only in three cases does the distance change by more than 1σ. We find generally good agreement with literature values from other methods. Using metallicity constraints that have also been derived from the same IFU data, we revisit the PNLF zero-point calibration. Over a range of 8.34 < 12 + log (O/H) < 8.59, our sample is consistent with a constant zero-point and yields a value of M∗ = −4.542^(+0.103)_(−0.059) mag⁠, within 1σ of other literature values. MUSE pushes the limits of PNLF studies and makes galaxies beyond 20Mpc accessible for this kind of analysis. This approach to the PNLF shows great promise for leveraging existing archival IFU data on nearby galaxies.

Additional Information

© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model). Accepted 2022 January 12. Received 2022 January 11; in original form 2021 September 14. Published: 18 January 2022. We thank the anonymous referee for the helpful comments that improved this work. This work was carried out as part of the PHANGS collaboration. Based on observations collected at the European Southern Observatory under ESO programmes 1100.B-0651, 095.C-0473, and 094.C-0623 (PHANGS–MUSE; PI Schinnerer), as well as 094.B-0321 (MAGNUM; PI Marconi), 099.B-0242, 0100.B-0116, 098.B-0551 (MAD; PI Carollo) and 097.B-0640 (TIMER; PI Gadotti). FS and KK gratefully acknowledges funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG) in the form of an Emmy Noether Research Group (grant number KR4598/2-1, PI Kreckel). GA acknowledges support from the IPAC Visiting Graduate Fellowship programme and from an award from the Space Telescope Science Institute in support of programme SNAP-15922. FS, ES and TGW acknowledge funding from the ERC under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 694343). ATB and FB would like to acknowledge funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 726384/Empire). SCOG and RSK acknowledge support from the DFG via SFB 881 'The Milky Way System' (project-ID 138713538; subprojects A1, B1, B2, and B8) and from the Heidelberg cluster of excellence EXC 2181-390900948 'STRUCTURES: A unifying approach to emergent phenomena in the physical world, mathematics, and complex data', funded by the German Excellence Strategy. RSK also thanks for support from the European Research Council via the ERC Synergy Grant 'ECOGAL – Understanding our Galactic ecosystem: From the disc of the Milky Way to the formation sites of stars and planets' (contract number 855130). JMDK gratefully acknowledges funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) through an Emmy Noether Research Group (grant number KR4801/1-1) and the DFG Sachbeihilfe (grant number KR4801/2-1), as well as from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme via the ERC Starting Grant MUSTANG (grant agreement number 714907). ER acknowledges the support of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), funding reference number RGPIN-2017-03987. EW acknowledges support from the DFG via SFB 881 'The Milky Way System' (project-ID 138713538; subproject P2). This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with NASA. It also made use of a number of python packages, namely PHOTUTILS, an Astropy package for detection and photometry of astronomical sources (Bradley et al. 2019) as well as the main ASTROPY package (Astropy Collaboration 2013, 2018), NUMPY (Harris et al. 2020) and MATPLOTLIB (Hunter 2007). Data Availability: The MUSE data underlying this article are presented in Emsellem et al. (2021) and are available at the ESO archive. The catalogue with the planetary nebulae identifications is available in the online supplementary material of the journal. The code for this project is available at https://github.com/fschmnn/pnlf.

Attached Files

Published - stac110.pdf

Accepted Version - 2201.04641.pdf

Supplemental Material - stac110_supplemental_file.zip

Files

stac110.pdf
Files (9.1 MB)
Name Size Download all
md5:4d15c268ffe4a2b96daf3b64149853cd
4.4 MB Preview Download
md5:5e5a66d26d5d8a047632fb30315fa283
4.7 MB Preview Download
md5:ac358cca2ac12c96e11fd6bfc41af57d
71.7 kB Preview Download

Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 24, 2023