Strategies for obtaining robust SED fitting parameters for galaxies at z~1 and z~2 in the absence of IR data

Abstract: Robust estimation of star formation rates (SFRs) at higher redshifts (z>1) using UV-optical-NIR photometry is contingent on the ability of spectral energy distribution (SED) fitting to simultaneously constrain the dust attenuation, stellar metallicity, and star formation history (SFH). IR-derived dust luminosities can help break the degeneracy between these parameters, but IR data is often not available. Here, we explore strategies for SED fitting at z>1 in the absence of IR data using a sample of log M*>10.2 star-forming galaxies from the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS) for which 24mu data are available. We adopt the total IR luminosity (L_TIR) obtained from 24mu as the 'ground truth' that allows us to assess how well it can be recovered (as L_dust) from UV-optical-NIR SED fitting. We test a variety of dust attenuation models, stellar population synthesis models, metallicity assumptions, and SFHs separately to identify which assumptions maximize the agreement (correlation and linearity) between L_TIR and L_dust. We find that a flexible dust attenuation law performs best. For stellar populations, we find that BC03 models are favored over those of BPASS. Fixing the stellar metallicity at solar value is preferred to other fixed values or leaving it as a free parameter. For SFHs, we find that minimizing the variability in the recent (<100 Myr) SFH improves the agreement with L_TIR. Finally, we provide a catalog of galaxy parameters (including M* and SFR) for CANDELS galaxies with log M*>8 and 0.7<z<1.3 obtained using the models we found to be the most robust.