On the different levels of dust attenuation to nebular and stellar light in star-forming galaxies

Abstract

As a science verification study of the newly released AKARI/FIS Faint Source Catalog ver. 1, this paper discusses the different levels of dust attenuation toward stellar light and nebular emission lines within local star-forming galaxies at 0.02 < z < 0.10. By constructing an updated version of the AKARI-SDSS-GALEX matched galaxy catalog (with >2000 sources), we compare the dust attenuation levels toward stellar light (from the L_IR/L_UV ratio) and nebular emission lines (from the Hα/Hβ ratio). We find that there is a clear trend that more massive galaxies tend to have higher "extra" attenuation toward nebular regions, while galaxies with higher specific star formation rates tend to have lower extra attenuation. We also confirm these trends by using the WISE mid-infrared photometry with a significantly large sample size of the WISE-SDSS-GALEX galaxies (>50000 sources). Finally, we study how the levels of extra attenuation toward nebular regions change across the SFR-M_⋆ plane. We find that, even at a fixed stellar mass, galaxies located below the main sequence tend to have higher levels of extra attenuation toward nebular regions, suggesting a change in dust geometry within the galaxies across the star-forming main sequence during the course of the star formation quenching process.