A New Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer Calibration of Stellar Mass

Abstract

We derive new empirical scaling relations between Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mid-IR (MIR) galaxy photometry and well-determined stellar masses from spectral energy distribution modeling of a suite of optical–infrared photometry provided by the Data Release 4 (DR4) Catalog of the GAMA-KiDS-VIKING survey of the southern G23 field. The MIR source extraction and characterization are drawn from the WISE Extended Source Catalogue and the archival ALLWISE catalog, combining both resolved and compact galaxies in the G23 sample to a redshift of 0.15. Three scaling relations are derived: W1 3.4 μm luminosity versus stellar mass, and WISE W1–W2, W1–W3 colors versus mass-to-light ratio (M/L, sensitive to a variety of galaxy types from passive to star-forming). For each galaxy in the sample, we then derive the combined stellar mass from these scaling relations, producing M ⋆ estimates with better than ∼25%–30% accuracy for galaxies with >109 M ⊙ and <40%–50% for lower-luminosity dwarf galaxies. We also provide simple prescriptions for rest-frame corrections and estimating stellar masses using only the W1 flux and the W1–W2 color, making stellar masses more accessible to users of the WISE data. Given a redshift or distance, these new scaling relations will enable stellar mass estimates for any galaxy in the sky detected by WISE with high fidelity across a range of M/L ratios.