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Published August 2019 | Accepted Version + Published
Journal Article Open

Dust attenuation, dust emission, and dust temperature in galaxies at z ≥ 5: a view from the FIRE-2 simulations

Abstract

We present a suite of 34 high-resolution cosmological zoom-in simulations consisting of thousands of haloes up to M_(halo) ∼ 10^(12) M_⊙ (⁠M_∗ ∼ 10^(10.5) M_⊙⁠) at z ≥ 5 from the Feedback in Realistic Environments project. We post-process our simulations with a three-dimensional Monte Carlo dust radiative transfer code to study dust attenuation, dust emission, and dust temperature within these simulated z ≥ 5 galaxies. Our sample forms a tight correlation between infrared excess (IRX ≡ F_(IR)/F_(UV)) and ultraviolet (UV)-continuum slope (βUV), despite the patchy, clumpy dust geometry shown in our simulations. We find that the IRX–βUV relation is mainly determined by the shape of the attenuation law and is independent of its normalization (set by the dust-to-gas ratio). The bolometric IR luminosity (L_(IR)) correlates with the intrinsic UV luminosity and the star formation rate (SFR) averaged over the past 10 Myr. We predict that at a given L_(IR), the peak wavelength of the dust spectral energy distributions for z ≥ 5 galaxies is smaller by a factor of 2 (due to higher dust temperatures on average) than at z = 0. The higher dust temperatures are driven by higher specific SFRs and SFR surface densities with increasing redshift. We derive the galaxy UV luminosity functions (UVLFs) at z = 5–10 from our simulations and confirm that a heavy attenuation is required to reproduce the observed bright-end UVLFs. We also predict the IR luminosity functions (IRLFs) and UV luminosity densities at z = 5–10. We discuss the implications of our results on current and future observations probing dust attenuation and emission in z ≥ 5 galaxies.

Additional Information

© 2019 The Author(s) Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the 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 2019 May 8. Received 2019 May 5; in original form 2019 February 25. We thank our referee, Maarten Baes, for helpful suggestions and for pointing out our mistakes in an earlier version of this paper in describing the technical details of the SKIRT code. The simulations used in this paper were run on XSEDE computational resources (allocations TG-AST120025, TG-AST130039, TG-AST140023, and TG-AST140064). CMC thanks the University of Texas at Austin College of Natural Sciences, NSF grants AST-1714528, AST-1814034, and a 2019 Cottrell Scholar Award for support from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. PFH was supported by an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, NASA ATP Grant NNX14AH35G, and NSF Collaborative Research Grant #1411920 and CAREER grant #1455342. CAFG was supported by NSF through grants AST-1517491, AST-1715216, and CAREER award AST-1652522; by NASA through grant 17-ATP17-0067; by STScI through grant HST-AR-14562.001; and by a Cottrell Scholar Award from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. EQ was supported by NASA ATP grant 12-APT12-0183, a Simons Investigator award from the Simons Foundation, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. RF acknowledges financial support from the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant no. 157591). DK was supported by NSF grant AST-1412153, funds from the University of California, San Diego, and a Cottrell Scholar Award from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. The Flatiron Institute is supported by the Simons Foundation.

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Accepted Version - 1902.10152.pdf

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Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 20, 2023