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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Steph CampbellORCiD, Dr David RosarioORCiD, Houda Haidar
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© The Author(s) 2025. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society.Broad-band mid-infrared (MIR) imaging with high-spatial resolution is useful to study extended dust structures in the circumnuclear regions of nearby active galactic nuclei. However, broad-band imaging filters cannot distinguish dust continuum emission from emission lines, and so accounting for the emission line contamination becomes crucial in studying extended dust in these environments. This paper uses Cycle 1 MIR imaging from the James Webb Space Telescope's Mid-Infrared Instrument (JWST/MIRI) and spectroscopy from the Medium-Resolution Spectrometer (JWST/MRS) for 11 local Seyfert galaxies, as part of the Galactic Activity, Torus and Outflow Survey (GATOS). Three of the objects (NGC 3081, NGC 5728, and NGC 7172) exist in both data sets, allowing direct measurement of the line emission using the spectroscopy for these objects. We find that extended MIR emission persists on scales of 100 s of parsecs after the removal of contamination from emission lines. Further, the line contamination levels vary greatly between objects (from 5 percent to 30 percent in the F1000W filter), and across filters, so cannot be generalized across a sample and must be carefully treated for each object and band. We also test methods to estimate the line contamination when only MRS spectroscopy or MIRI imaging is available, using pre-JWST ancillary data. We find that these methods estimate the contamination within 10 percentage points. This paper serves as a useful guide for methods to quantify and mitigate for emission line contamination in MIRI broad-band imaging.
Author(s): Campbell S, Rosario DJ, Haidar H, Lopez Rodriguez E, Delaney D, Hicks E, Garcia-Bernete I, Pereira-Santaella M, Alonso Herrero A, Audibert A, Bellocchi E, Esparza-Arredondo D, Garcia-Burillo S, Gonzalez Martin O, Honig SF, Levenson NA, Packham C, Ramos Almeida C, Rigopoulou D, Zhang L
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Year: 2025
Volume: 544
Issue: 1
Pages: 648-668
Online publication date: 11/10/2025
Acceptance date: 03/10/2025
Date deposited: 11/11/2025
ISSN (print): 0035-8711
ISSN (electronic): 1365-2966
Publisher: Oxford University Press
URL: https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/staf1719
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/staf1719
Data Access Statement: All observations in this paper are publicly available in archives with the proposalIDs given in Section 2, and can be processed as described in this paper. Specific analysis products from the paper are available on request. All the JWST data used in this paper can be found in MAST: https://doi.org/10.17909/9bc1-r464.
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