2019A&A...631A.123Y

Context. Nebular emission lines are critical to measure physical properties in the ionized gas (e.g., metallicity, the star formation rate, or dust attenuation). They also account for a significant fraction of broadband fluxes, in particular at the highest redshifts, and therefore can strongly affect the determination of other physical properties, such as the stellar mass, which are crucial in shaping our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution.
Aims. We investigate a sample of 51 Lyman break galaxies at 3.0<z_spec<3.8 with detected [OIII] line emissions and estimated the physical properties of these galaxies to examine the impact of including nebular emission data in the Spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting.
Methods. We used the Code Investigating GALaxy Emission (CIGALE) to fit the rest-frame ultraviolet-to-near-infrared SEDs of these galaxies and their emission line data simultaneously. We ran CIGALE with and without the nebular model or the emission line data, and compare the results to show the importance of including the nebular emission line data in the SED fitting.
Results. We find that without the nebular model, the SED fitting overestimates the stellar mass due to the strong [OIII] lines that are redshifted to the K_s-band, which is consistent with previous results. The emission line data are necessary to constrain the nebular model in the SED fitting. We examine the K_s-band excess, which is mostly used to estimate the emissions of the [OIII]+Hβ lines when there is no spectral data, and we find that the estimation and observation are statistically consistent. However, the difference can reach up to more than 1 dex in some catastrophic cases, which shows the importance of obtaining spectroscopic measurements for these lines. We also estimate the equivalent width of the Hβ absorption and find it negligible compared to the Hβ emission.
Conclusions. Line emission is important to constrain the nebular models and to obtain reliable estimates of the physical properties of galaxies. These data should be taken into account in the SED fitting.