A1 Refereed original research article in a scientific journal
The MUSE view of the Sculptor galaxy: Survey overview and the luminosity function of planetary nebulae
Authors: Congiu, E.; Scheuermann, F.; Kreckel, K.; Leroy, A.; Emsellem, E.; Belfiore, F.; Hartke, J.; Anand, G.; Egorov, O. V.; Groves, B.; Kravtsov, T.; Thilker, D.; Tovo, C.; Bigiel, F.; Blanc, G. A.; Bolatto, A. D.; Cronin, S. A.; Dale, D. A.; Mcclain, R.; Mendez-Delgado, J. E.; Oakes, E. K.; Klessen, R. S.; Schinnerer, E.; Williams, T. G.
Publisher: EDP SCIENCES S A
Publishing place: LES ULIS CEDEX A
Publication year: 2025
Journal: Astronomy and Astrophysics
Journal name in source: ASTRONOMY & ASTROPHYSICS
Journal acronym: ASTRON ASTROPHYS
Article number: A125
Volume: 700
Number of pages: 21
ISSN: 0004-6361
eISSN: 1432-0746
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202554144
Web address : https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202554144
Self-archived copy’s web address: https://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/499840063
Preprint address: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14921
The Sculptor galaxy, NGC 253, is the southern massive star-forming disk galaxy that is closest to the Milky Way. We present a new 103-pointing MUSE mosaic of this galaxy that covers most of its star-forming disk up to 0.75 x R-25. With an area of similar to 20 x 5 arcmin(2) (similar to 20 x 5 kpc(2), projected) and a physical resolution of similar to 15 pc, this mosaic constitutes one of the largest integral field spectroscopy surveys with the highest physical resolution of any star-forming galaxy to date. We exploited the mosaic to identify a sample of similar to 500 planetary nebulae (the sample is similar to 20 times larger than in previous studies) to build the planetary nebula luminosity function (PNLF) and obtain a new estimate of the distance to NGC 253. The value we obtained is 17% higher than the estimates returned by other reliable measurements, which were mainly obtained via the top of the red giant branch method. The PNLF also varies between the centre (r < 4 kpc) and the disk of the galaxy. The distance derived from the PNLF of the outer disk is comparable to that of the full sample, while the PNLF of the centre returns a distance that is larger by similar to 0.9 Mpc. Our analysis suggests that extinction related to the dust-rich interstellar medium and edge-on view of the galaxy (the average E(B-V) across the disk is similar to 0.35 mag) plays a major role in explaining both the larger distance recovered from the full PNLF and the difference between the PNLFs in the centre and the disk.
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The authors would like to thank our referee, Dr. Micheal Richer, for the excellent comments that helped improve this work. Based on observations collected at the European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere under ESO programmes 108.2289 (PI: Congiu) and 0102.B-0078(A) (PI: Zschaechner). This work was carried out as part of the PHANGS collaboration. FS and KK acknowledge support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) in the form of an Emmy Noether Research Group (grant number KR4598/2-1, PI Kreckel) and the European Research Council’s starting grant ERC StG-101077573 (“ISM-METALS”). OE acknowledges funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – project-ID 541068876. E.C. and J.H. acknowledge the financial support from the visitor and mobility program of the Finnish Centre for Astronomy with ESO (FINCA). JEMD acknowledges support from project UNAM DGAPA-PAPIIT IG 101025, Mexico. A.D.B. and S.A.C. acknowledge support from the NSF under award AST-2108140. R.S.K. acknowledges financial support from the ERC via Synergy Grant “ECOGAL” (project ID 855130), from the German Excellence Strategy via the Heidelberg Cluster “STRUCTURES” (EXC 2181 – 390900948), and from the German Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action in project “MAINN” (funding ID 50OO2206). RSK also thanks the 2024/25 Class of Radcliffe Fellows for highly interesting and stimulating discussions. This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database, which is funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and operated by the California Institute of Technology. This research has made use of the Astrophysics Data System, funded by NASA under Cooperative Agreement 80NSSC21M00561. This research made use of Astropy, a community-developed core Python package for Astronomy (Astropy Collaboration 2013, 2018), Matplotlib (Hunter 2007), MPDAF (Bacon et al. 2016; Piqueras et al. 2017), NumPy (Harris et al. 2020), Photutils (Bradley et al. 2024), Pyneb (Luridiana et al. 2015), SciPy (Virtanen et al. 2020), Scikit-learn (Pedregosa et al. 2011).
