VALES – III. The calibration between the dust continuum and interstellar gas content of star-forming galaxies

• Published in: Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Letters Vol. 468; no. 1; pp. L103 - L107
• Main Authors: Hughes, T. M., Ibar, E., Villanueva, V., Aravena, M., Baes, M., Bourne, N., Cooray, A., Davies, L. J. M., Driver, S., Dunne, L., Dye, S., Eales, S., Furlanetto, C., Herrera-Camus, R., Ivison, R. J., van Kampen, E., Lara-López, M. A., Maddox, S., Michałowski, M. J., Oteo, I., Smith, D., Smith, M. W. L., Valiante, E., van der Werf, P., Viaene, S., Xue, Y. Q.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford University Press 11.06.2017
• Subjects: ISM: lines and bands; submillimetre: galaxies; galaxies: ISM
• ISSN: 1745-3925; 1745-3933
• DOI: 10.1093/mnrasl/slx033

Abstract We present the calibration between the dust continuum luminosity and interstellar gas content obtained from the Valparaíso ALMA Line Emission Survey (VALES) sample of 67 main-sequence star-forming galaxies at 0.02 < z < 0.35. We use CO(1–0) observations from the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array to trace the molecular gas mass, M H 2, and estimate the rest-frame monochromatic luminosity at 850 μm, $L_{\nu _{850}}$ , by extrapolating the dust continuum from magphys modelling of the far-ultraviolet to submillimetre spectral energy distribution sampled by the Galaxy And Mass Assembly survey. Adopting αCO = 6.5 (K km s−1 pc2)−1, the average ratio of $L_{\nu _{850}}$ /M H 2 = (6.4 ± 1.4)× 1019 erg s−1 Hz−1 M $_{{\odot }}^{-1}$ , in excellent agreement with literature values. We obtain a linear fit of $\log _{10} \left({M}_{\mathrm{H}_{2}}/{\mathrm{M}_{{\odot }}}\right) = (0.92\pm 0.02) \log _{10} (L_{\nu _{850}}/{\mathrm{erg}\,\mathrm{s}^{-1}\,\mathrm{Hz}^{-1}})-(17.31\pm 0.59)$ . We provide relations between $L_{\nu _{850}}$ , M H 2 and M ISM when combining the VALES and literature samples, and adopting a Galactic αCO value.