Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon (PAH) Luminous Galaxies In JWST CEERS Data

It has been an unanswered question how many dusty galaxies have been undetected from the state-of-the-art observational surveys.

JWST enables us to detect faint IR galaxies that have prominent polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) features in the mid-IR wavelengths.

PAH is a valuable tracer of star formation and dust properties in the mid-infrared wavelength. The JWST Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) fields provide us with wavelength coverage from 7.7 to 21 μm using six photometric bands of the mid-infrared instrument (MIRI). We have identified galaxies dominated by mid-IR emission from PAHs, termed PAH galaxies.

From our multi-band photometry catalogue, we selected ten PAH galaxies displaying high flux ratios of log(S15/S10)>0.8. The SED fitting analysis indicates that these galaxies are star-forming galaxies with total IR luminosities of 1010 ∼ 1011.5 L⊙ at z ∼1. The morphology of PAH galaxies does not show any clear signatures of major merging or interaction within the MIRI resolution. The majority of them are on the star-formation main sequence at z∼1.

Our result demonstrates that JWST can detect PAH emissions from normal star-forming galaxies at z∼1, in addition to ultra-luminous infrared galaxies (ULIRGs) or luminous infrared galaxies (LIRGs).

Yu-Wei Lin, Cossas K.-W. Wu, Chih-Teng Ling, Tomotsugu Goto, Seong Jin Kim, Ece Kilerci, Tetsuya Hashimoto, Po-Ya Wang, Simon C.-C. Ho, Tiger Yu-Yang Hsiao, Bjorn Jasper R. Raquel, Yuri Uno

Comments: 12 pages, 20 figures, 4 tables. Accepted by MNRAS. A summary video is at this https URL
Subjects: Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA); Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO)
Cite as: arXiv:2401.01043 [astro-ph.GA] (or arXiv:2401.01043v1 [astro-ph.GA] for this version)
Submission history
From: Yu-Wei Lin
[v1] Tue, 2 Jan 2024 05:35:14 UTC (1,342 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.01043
Astrobiology, Astrochemistry,