The dust scaling relations of the Herschel Reference Survey^⋆,⋆⋆

¹ European Southern Observatory, Karl Schwarzschild Str. 2, 85748 Garching bei München, Germany
e-mail: lcortese@eso.org
² Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille, UMR 6110 CNRS, 38 rue F. Joliot-Curie, 13388 Marseille, France
³ INAF – Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri, Largo Enrico Fermi 5, 50125 Firenze, Italy
⁴ School of Physics and Astronomy, Cardiff University, The Parade, Cardiff, CF24 3AA, UK
⁵ UK ALMA Regional Centre Node, Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK
⁶ Sterrenkundig Observatorium, Universiteit Gent, Krijgslaan 281 S9, 9000 Gent, Belgium
⁷ Kavli Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics, Peking University, 100871 Beijing, PR China
⁸ Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale (IAS), Batiment 121, Universite Paris-Sud 11 and CNRS, 91405 Orsay, France
⁹ Visiting Astronomer, Max-Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische Physik, Giessenbachstrasse, Postfach 1312, 85741 Garching bei München, Germany
¹⁰ Dark Cosmology Centre, Niels Bohr Institute University of Copenhagen, Juliane Maries Vej 30, 2100 Copenhagen, Denmark
¹¹ Astrophysics Group, Blackett Lab, Imperial College, Prince Consort Road, London SW7 2AZ, UK
¹² University of California, Irvine, Department of Physics & Astronomy, 4186 Frederick Reines Hall, Irvine, CA, USA
¹³ Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, Madingley Road, Cambridge, CB3 0HA, UK
¹⁴ Istituto di Fisica dello Spazio Interplanetario, INAF, via Fosso del Cavaliere 100, 00133 Roma, Italy
¹⁵ Joint ALMA Office, Alonso de Cordova 3107, Vitacura, Santiago, Chile
¹⁶ Departamento de Astronomia, Universidad de Chile, Casilla 36-D, Santiago, Chile

Received: 22 November 2011
Accepted: 10 January 2012

Abstract

We combine new Herschel/SPIRE sub-millimeter observations with existing multiwavelength data to investigate the dust scaling relations of the Herschel Reference Survey, a magnitude-, volume-limited sample of  ~300 nearby galaxies in different environments. We show that the dust-to-stellar mass ratio anti-correlates with stellar mass, stellar mass surface density and NUV − r colour across the whole range of parameters covered by our sample. Moreover, the dust-to-stellar mass ratio decreases significantly when moving from late- to early-type galaxies. These scaling relations are similar to those observed for the Hi gas-fraction, supporting the idea that the cold dust is tightly coupled to the cold atomic gas component in the interstellar medium. We also find a weak increase of the dust-to-Hi mass ratio with stellar mass and colour but no trend is seen with stellar mass surface density. By comparing galaxies in different environments we show that, although these scaling relations are followed by both cluster and field galaxies, Hi-deficient systems have, at fixed stellar mass, stellar mass surface density and morphological type systematically lower dust-to-stellar mass and higher dust-to-Hi mass ratios than Hi-normal/field galaxies. This provides clear evidence that dust is removed from the star-forming disk of cluster galaxies but the effect of the environment is less strong than what is observed in the case of the Hi disk. Such effects naturally arise if the dust disk is less extended than the Hi and follows more closely the distribution of the molecular gas phase, i.e., if the dust-to-atomic gas ratio monotonically decreases with distance from the galactic center.