Optical Star Formation Rate Indicators | Zendy

John Moustakas | Zendy; Robert C. Kennicutt | Zendy; Christy Tremonti | Zendy

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Optical Star Formation Rate Indicators

Author(s) -

John Moustakas,

Robert C. Kennicutt,

Christy Tremonti

Publication year - 2006

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 - 10.1086/500964

Subject(s) - astrophysics , metallicity , physics , galaxy , doubly ionized oxygen , luminosity , ionization , star formation , extinction (optical mineralogy) , emission spectrum , astronomy , spectral line , ion , quantum mechanics , optics

Using integrated optical spectrophotometry for 412 star-forming galaxies atz~0, and fiber-aperture spectrophotometry for 120,846 SDSS galaxies at z~0.1,we investigate the H-alpha, H-beta, [O II] 3727, and [O III] 5007 nebularemission lines and the U-band luminosity as quantitative star-formation rate(SFR) indicators. We demonstrate that the extinction-corrected H-alphaluminosity is a reliable SFR tracer even in highly obscured star-forminggalaxies. We find that variations in dust reddening dominate the systematicuncertainty in SFRs derived from the observed H-beta, [O II], and U-bandluminosities, producing a factor of ~1.7, ~2.5, and ~2.1 scatter in the meantransformations, respectively. We show that [O II] depends weakly on variationsin oxygen abundance over a wide range in metallicity, 12+log(O/H)=8.15-8.7 dex(Z/Z_sun=0.28-1.0), and that in this metallicity interval galaxies occupy anarrow range in ionization parameter (-3.8

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