Dust emission profiles of DustPedia galaxies

In this paper our goal is to verify this assumption by analysing the two-dimensional large-scale distribution of dust in galaxies from the DustPedia sample. For this purpose, we have made use of Herschel imaging in five bands, from 100 to 500um, in which the cold dust constituent is primarily traced and makes up the bulk of the dust mass in spiral galaxies.

For a subsample of 320 disc galaxies, we successfully performed a simultaneous fitting with a single Sersic model of the Herschel images in all five bands using the multi-band modelling code GALFITM. We report that the Sersic index n, which characterises the shape of the Sersic profile, lies systematically below 1 in all Herschel bands and is almost constant with wavelength. The average value at 250um is 0.67+/-0.37 (187 galaxies are fitted with n^250^<=0.75, 87 galaxies have 0.75<n^250^<=1.25, and 46 - with n^250^>1.25).