Nebular dust attenuation with the Balmer and Paschen lines based on the MaNGA survey

¹ Department of Physics, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong S.A.R., China
² CUHK Shenzhen Research Institute, No.10, 2nd Yuexing Road, Nanshan, Shenzhen, China

^⋆ Corresponding authors; zslin@cuhk.edu.hk, rbyan@phy.cuhk.edu.hk

Received: 2 July 2024
Accepted: 7 October 2024

Abstract

Dust attenuations observed by stars and ionized gas are not necessarily the same. The lack of observational constraints on the nebular dust attenuation curve leaves a large uncertainty when correcting nebular dust attenuation with stellar continuum-based attenuation curves. Making use of the DAP catalogs of the MaNGA survey, we investigate the nebular dust attenuation of H II regions traced by the Balmer and Paschen lines. Based on a simple simulation, we find that star-forming regions on kpc scales favor the classic foreground screen dust model rather than the uniform mixture model. We propose a novel approach to fit the dust attenuation curve using the emission-line fluxes directly. For strong hydrogen recombination lines (e.g., Hγ, Hδ, and Hϵ), the slopes of the nebular attenuation curve can be well determined and are found to be in good agreement with the Fitzpatrick Milky Way extinction curve with an accuracy of ≲4% in terms of the correction factor. However, severe contaminations and/or systematic uncertainties prevent us from obtaining reasonable values of the slopes for weak recombination lines (e.g., the high-order Balmer lines or the Paschen lines). We discuss how the choice of emission line measurement methods affects the results. Our results demonstrate the difficulty of deriving an average nebular dust attenuation curve given the current ground-based emission-line measurements.