Physical properties of star-forming clumps in nearby galaxies from CLAUDS and HSC-SSP

RESUMO

Giant Star-forming Clumps (GSFCs) are kpc-scale regions of enhanced star-formation with stellar masses of $10^6$ to $10^{10}\,M_\odot$ that are commonly observed in high-redshift ($z \gtrsim 1$) galaxies but their formation and role in galaxy evolution remain unclear. We applied a Faster R-CNN object detection framework (FRCNN) to identify star-forming clumps in astrophysical imaging data from a mass-complete sample of $\sim$210,000 low-redshift galaxies ($z\lesssim0.32$), located in the HSC-SSP Wide and Deep fields observed by the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Survey (HSC-SSP) and CFHT Large Area U-band Deep Survey (CLAUDS). We present a population of $\sim$710,000 detected clumps for which we measured the (u)grizy-photometry and derived the physical properties (stellar mass, age, dust extinction and star-formation rate) for each clump by fitting the photometric data to stellar population models. We estimate that the clump Stellar Mass Function (cSMF) for young clumps ($<100\,\mathrm{Myr}$) follows a power law with an exponent of $\alpha=1.98\pm0.02$ down to a completeness limit of $\sim10^{8}\,M_\odot$ which is consistent with an in situ formation through violent disk instabilities (VDI). The clumps show elevated star-formation rates and negative gradients in their ages and stellar masses as a function of galactocentric distance. These gradients are steeper than those measured for the intra-clump regions of the host galaxies and are robust against uncertainties introduced by different modelling assumptions. For nearby galaxies we argue that the observed low-redshift clumps are likely analogues of high-redshift GSFCs and that the inward migration of star-forming clumps directly contributes to the central bulge formation of the host galaxy.