GATOS – IX. A detailed assessment and treatment of emission line contamination in JWST /MIRI images of nearby Seyfert galaxies

Journal article

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 per cent to 30 per cent 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.

Authors: Campbell, S; Rosario, DJ; Haidar, H; López Rodríguez, E; Delaney, D

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Journal: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
• Volume: 544
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 648-668
• Publication date: 2025-10-11
• Acceptance date: 2025-10-03
• DOI: 10.1093/mnras/staf1719
• EISSN: 1365-2966
• ISSN: 0035-8711
• Language: English
• Keywords: methods: observational; galaxies: Seyfert; galaxies: active; ISM: jets and outflows; infrared: galaxies