Spatially Resolved Properties of Galaxies from CANDELS+MUSE: Radial Extinction Profile and Insights on Quenching

Abstract

Abstract Studying the internal processes of individual galaxies at kilo-parsec scales is crucial in enhancing our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution processes. In this work, we investigate the distribution of star formation rate (SFR), specific SFR (sSFR), and dust attenuation across individual galaxies for a sample of 32 galaxies selected from the MUSE-Wide Survey at 0.1 < z < 0.42 with a dynamic range in stellar masses between 107.7 and 1010.3 M ⊙. We take advantage of the high spatial resolution of the MUSE integral field spectrograph and measure reliable spatially resolved Hα and Hβ emission-line maps for individual galaxies. We also derive resolved stellar mass, SFR and dust maps using pixel-by-pixel spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting on high-resolution multiband Hubble Space Telescope (HST)/Advanced Camera for Surveys and HST/Wide Field Camera 3 data from the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey survey. By combining these, we analyze the radial profile of various physical parameters across these galaxies. We observe a radial dependence in both stellar and nebular color excess profiles peaking at the inner regions of galaxies. We also find the color excess profiles to most strongly correlate with the integrated sSFRs of galaxies. The median sSFRHα radial profiles of galaxies in our sample show a 0.8 dex increase from the central regions outward. This increase compared with the almost flat median radial profile of sSFRSED, which traces longer timescales of star formation, is in favor of the inside-out quenching of star formation. We bring further evidence for this quenching scenario from the locus of different subregions of galaxies on the SFR–M * and sSFR–M * relations.