2012ApJ...757...52M

The correlation between infrared-to-ultraviolet luminosity ratio and ultraviolet color (or ultraviolet spectral slope), i.e., the IRX-UV (or IRX-β) relation, found in studies of starburst galaxies is a prevalent recipe for correcting extragalactic dust attenuation. Considerable dispersion in this relation discovered for normal galaxies, however, complicates its usability. In order to investigate the cause of the dispersion and to have a better understanding of the nature of the IRX-UV relation, in this paper, we select five nearby spiral galaxies, and perform spatially resolved studies on each of the galaxies, with a combination of ultraviolet and infrared imaging data. We measure all positions within each galaxy and divide the extracted regions into young and evolved stellar populations. By means of this approach, we attempt to discover separate effects of dust attenuation and stellar population age on the IRX-UV relation for individual galaxies. In this work, in addition to dust attenuation, stellar population age is interpreted to be another parameter in the IRX-UV function, and the diversity of star formation histories is suggested to disperse the age effects. At the same time, strong evidence shows the need for more parameters in the interpretation of observational data, such as variations in attenuation/extinction law. Fractional contributions of different components to the integrated luminosities of the galaxies suggest that the integrated measurements of these galaxies, which comprise different populations, would weaken the effect of the age parameter on IRX-UV diagrams. The dependence of the IRX-UV relation on luminosity and radial distance in galaxies presents weak trends, which offers an implication of selective effects. The two-dimensional maps of the UV color and the infrared-to-ultraviolet ratio are displayed and show a disparity in the spatial distributions between the two galaxy parameters, which offers a spatial interpretation of the scatter in the IRX-UV relation.