Paper detail

The Heating of Mid-Infrared Dust in the Nearby Galaxy M33: A Testbed for Tracing Galaxy Evolution

Because the 8 μm polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) emission has been found to correlate with other well-known star formation tracers, it has widely been used as a star formation rate (SFR) tracer. There are, however, studies that challenge the accuracy and reliability of the 8 μm emission as a SFR tracer. Our study, part of the Herschel M33 Extended Survey (HERM33ES) open time key program, aims at addressing this issue by analyzing the infrared emission from the nearby spiral galaxy M33 at the high spatial scale of 75 pc. Combining data from the Herschel Space Observatory and the Spitzer Space Telescope we find that the 8 μm emission is better correlated with the 250 μm emission, which traces cold interstellar gas, than with the 24 μm emission. The L(8)/L(24) ratio is highly depressed in 24 μm luminous regions, which correlate with known HII regions. We also compare our results with the dust emission models by Draine & Li (2007). We confirm that the depression of 8 μm PAH emission near star-forming regions is higher than what is predicted by models; this is possibly an effect of increased stellar radiation from young stars destroying the dust grains responsible for the 8 μm emission as already suggested by other authors. We find that the majority of the 8 μm emission is fully consistent with heating by the diffuse interstellar medium, similar to what recently determined for the dust emission in M31 by Draine at al. (2013). We also find that the fraction of 8 μm emission associated with the diffuse interstellar radiation field ranges between 60% and 80% and is 40% larger than the diffuse fraction at 24 μm.