The Impact of Inclination-dependent Attenuation on Ultraviolet Star Formation Rate Tracers

We examine and quantify how hybrid (e.g., UV+IR) star formation rate (SFR) estimators and the AFUV–β relation depend on inclination for disk-dominated galaxies using spectral energy distribution modeling that utilizes the inclination-dependent attenuation curves described in Doore et al. We perform this analysis on a sample of 133 disk-dominated galaxies from the CANDELS fields and 18 disk galaxies from the Spitzer Infrared Nearby Galaxies Survey and Key Insights on Nearby Galaxies: A Far-Infrared Survey with Herschel samples. We find that both the hybrid SFR estimators and the AFUV–β relation present clear dependencies on inclination. To quantify this dependence in the hybrid SFR estimators, we derive an inclination and a far-UV–near-IR color-dependent parametric relation for converting observed UV and IR luminosities into SFRs. For the AFUV–β relation, we introduce an inclination-dependent component that accounts for the majority of the inclination dependence with the scatter of the relation increasing with inclination. We then compare both of these inclination-dependent relations to similar inclination-independent relations found in the literature. From this comparison, we find that the UV+IR correction factor and AFUV for our hybrid and AFUV–β relations, respectively, result in a reduction in the residual scatter of our sample by approximately a factor of 2. Therefore, we demonstrate that inclination must be considered in hybrid SFR estimators and the AFUV–β relation to produce more accurate SFR estimates in disk-dominated galaxies.