Starburst Galaxies: Why the Calzetti Dust Extinction Law? | Zendy

Jrg Fischera | Zendy; M. A. Dopita | Zendy; Ralph S. Sutherland | Zendy

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Starburst Galaxies: Why the Calzetti Dust Extinction Law?

Author(s) -

Jrg Fischera,

M. A. Dopita,

Ralph S. Sutherland

Publication year - 2003

Publication title -

the astrophysical journal

Language(s) - English

Resource type - Journals

SCImago Journal Rank - 2.376

H-Index - 489

eISSN - 1538-4357

pISSN - 0004-637X

DOI - 10.1086/381190

Subject(s) - extinction (optical mineralogy) , galaxy , physics , astrophysics , log normal distribution , law , range (aeronautics) , astronomy , optics , statistics , mathematics , materials science , political science , composite material

The empirical reddening function for starburst galaxies generated by Calzettiand her co-workers has proven very successful, and is now used widely in theobservational literature. Despite its success, however, the physical basis forthis extinction law, or more correctly, attenuation law remains weak. Here weprovide a physical explanation for the Calzetti Law based on a turbulentinterstellar medium. In essence, this provides a log-normal distribution ofcolumn densities, giving a wide range of column densities in the dustyforeground screen. Therefore, extended sources such as starburst regions or HIIregions seen through it suffer a point-to-point stochastic extinction andreddening. Regions of high column densities are "black" in the UV, buttranslucent in the IR, which leads to a flatter extinction law, and a largervalue of the total to selective extinction, R_V. We fit the Calzetti Law, andinfer that the variance sigma of the log-normal distribution lies in the range0.6

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