Spectral synthesis of star-forming galaxies in the near-infrared

Abstract

The near-infrared spectral region is becoming a very useful wavelength range to detect and quantify the stellar population of galaxies. Models are developing to predict the contribution of the thermally pulsating stars on the asymptotic giant branch stars that should dominate the near-infrared region (NIR) spectra of populations 0.3 to 2 Gyr old. When present in a given stellar population, these stars leave unique signatures that can be used to detect them unambiguously. However, these models have to be tested in a homogeneous data base of star-forming galaxies, to check if the results are consistent with what is found from different wavelength ranges. In this work, we performed stellar population synthesis on the nuclear and extended regions of 23 star-forming galaxies to understand how the star formation tracers in the NIR can be used in practice. The stellar population synthesis shows that for the galaxies with strong emission in the NIR, there is an important fraction of young/intermediate population contributing to the spectra, which is probably the ionization source in these galaxies. Galaxies that had no emission lines measured in the NIR were found to have older average ages and less contribution of young populations. Although the stellar population synthesis method proved to be very effective to find the young ionizing population in these galaxies, no clear correlation between these results and the NIR spectral indexes were found. Thus, we believe that, in practice, the use of these indexes is still very limited due to observational limitations.