A z = 0 Multiwavelength Galaxy Synthesis. I. A WISE and GALEX Atlas of Local Galaxies

Abstract

Abstract We present an atlas of ultraviolet and infrared images of ∼15,750 local (d ≲ 50 Mpc) galaxies, as observed by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) missions. These maps have matched resolution (FWHM 7.″5 and 15″), matched astrometry, and a common procedure for background removal. We demonstrate that they agree well with resolved intensity measurements and integrated photometry from previous surveys. This atlas represents the first part of a program (the z = 0 Multiwavelength Galaxy Synthesis) to create a large, uniform database of resolved measurements of gas and dust in nearby galaxies. The images and associated catalogs will be publicly available at the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive. This atlas allows us estimate local and integrated star formation rates (SFRs) and stellar masses (M ⋆) across the local galaxy population in a uniform way. In the appendix, we use the population synthesis fits of Salim et al. to calibrate integrated M ⋆ and SFR estimators based on GALEX and WISE. Because they leverage a Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)-based training set of >100,000 galaxies, these calibrations have high precision and allow us to rigorously compare local galaxies to SDSS results. We provide these SFR and M ⋆ estimates for all galaxies in our sample and show that our results yield a “main sequence” of star-forming galaxies comparable to previous work. We also show the distribution of intensities from resolved galaxies in NUV-to-WISE1 versus WISE1-to-WISE3 space, which captures much of the key physics accessed by these bands.