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The interstellar dust content in galaxies can be traced in extinction atoptical wavelengths, or in emission in the far-infrared. Several studies havefound that radiative transfer models that successfully explain the opticalextinction in edge-on spiral galaxies generally underestimate the observedFIR/submm fluxes by a factor of about three. In order to investigate thisso-called dust energy balance problem, we use two Milky Way-like galaxiesproduced by high-resolution hydrodynamical simulations. We create mock opticaledge-on views of these simulated galaxies (using the radiative transfer codeSKIRT), and we then fit the parameters of a basic spiral galaxy model to theseimages (using the fitting code FitSKIRT). The basic model includes smoothaxisymmetric distributions along a S\'ersic bulge and exponential disc for thestars, and a second exponential disc for the dust. We find that the dust massrecovered by the fitted models is about three times smaller than the known dustmass of the hydrodynamical input models. This factor is in agreement withprevious energy balance studies of real edge-on spiral galaxies. On the otherhand, fitting the same basic model to less complex input models (e.g. a smoothexponential disc with a spiral perturbation or with random clumps), doesrecover the dust mass of the input model almost perfectly. Thus it seems thatthe complex asymmetries and the inhomogeneous structure of real andhydrodynamically simulated galaxies are a lot more efficient at hiding dustthan the rather contrived geometries in typical quasi-analytical models. Thiseffect may help explain the discrepancy between the dust emission predicted byradiative transfer models and the observed emission in energy balance studiesfor edge-on spiral galaxies.

Large and small-scale structures and the dust energy balance problem in spiral galaxies