Pattle, K;
Gear, W;
Wilson, CD;
(2023)
The JCMT nearby galaxies legacy survey: SCUBA-2 observations of nearby galaxies.
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
, 522
(2)
pp. 2339-2368.
10.1093/mnras/stad652.
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Abstract
We present 850 μm observations of a sample of 8 nearby spiral galaxies, made using the SCUBA-2 camera on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) as part of the JCMT Nearby Galaxies Legacy Survey (NGLS). We corrected our data for the presence of the12CO J = 3 → 2 line in the SCUBA-2 850 μm bandwidth using NGLS HARP data, finding a typical12CO contribution of ∼20 per cent. We measured dust column densities, temperatures, and opacity indices by fitting spectral energy distributions constructed from SCUBA-2 and archival Herschel observations, and used archival GALEX and Spitzer data to make maps of surface density of star formation (∑SFR). Typically, comparing SCUBA-2-derived H2 surface densities (∑H2) to ∑SFR gives shallow star formation law indices within galaxies, with SCUBA-2-derived values typically being sublinear and Herschel-derived values typically being broadly linear. This difference is likely due to the effects of atmospheric filtering on the SCUBA-2 data. Comparing the mean values of ∑H2 and ∑SFR of the galaxies in our sample returns a steeper star formation law index, broadly consistent with both the Kennicutt–Schmidt value of 1.4 and linearity. Our results show that a SCUBA-2 detection is a good predictor of star formation. We suggest that Herschel emission traces gas in regions which will form stars on time-scales ∼5 − 100 Myr, comparable to the star formation time-scale traced by GALEX and Spitzer data, while SCUBA-2 preferentially traces the densest gas within these regions, which likely forms stars on shorter time-scales.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | The JCMT nearby galaxies legacy survey: SCUBA-2 observations of nearby galaxies |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1093/mnras/stad652 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stad652 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| Keywords: | galaxies: ISM – galaxies: star formation – submillimetre: galaxies.. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Physics and Astronomy |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10172459 |
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