Dust Heating By Low-mass Stars in Massive Galaxies at z< 1

March 2015 • 2015ApJ...801..134K

Authors • Kajisawa, M. • Morishita, T. • Taniguchi, Y. • Kobayashi, M. A. R. • Ichikawa, T. • Fukui, Y.

Abstract • Using the Hubble Space Telescope/Wide Field Camera 3 imaging data and multi-wavelength photometric catalog, we investigated the dust temperature of passively evolving and star-forming galaxies at 0.2\lt z\lt 1.0 in the CANDELS fields. We estimated the stellar radiation field by low-mass stars from the stellar mass and surface brightness profile of these galaxies and then calculated their steady-state dust temperature. At first, we tested our method using nearby early-type galaxies with the deep far-IR data by the Herschel Virgo cluster survey and confirmed that the estimated dust temperatures are consistent with the observed temperatures within the uncertainty. We then applied the method to galaxies at 0.2\lt z\lt 1.0, and found that most passively evolving galaxies with {{M}_star}\gt {{10}¹⁰} {{M}_⊙} have relatively high dust temperatures of {{T}_dust}\gt 20 K, for which the formation efficiency of molecular hydrogen on the surface of dust grains in the diffuse ISM is expected to be very low from the laboratory experiments. The fraction of passively evolving galaxies strongly depends on the expected dust temperature at all redshifts and increases rapidly increasing temperature around {{T}_dust}∼ 20 K. These results suggest that the dust heating by low-mass stars in massive galaxies plays an important role in the continuation of their passive evolution because the lack of the shielding effect of the molecular hydrogen on the UV radiation can prevent the gas cooling and formation of new stars.

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Takahiro Morishita

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