On the different levels of dust attenuation to nebular and stellar light
  in star-forming galaxies
  As a science verification study of the newly released AKARI/FIS Faint Source
Catalog ver.1, this paper discusses the different levels of dust attenuation
toward stellar light and nebular emission lines within local star-forming
galaxies at 0.02<z<0.10. By constructing an updated version of the
AKARI-SDSS-GALEX matched galaxy catalog (with >2,000 sources), we compare the
dust attenuation levels toward stellar light (from L(IR)/L(UV) ratio) and
nebular emission lines (from H-alpha/H-beta ratio). We find that there is a
clear trend that more massive galaxies tend to have higher "extra" attenuation
toward nebular regions, while galaxies with higher specific star formation
rates tend to have lower extra attenuation. We also confirm these trends by
using the WISE mid-infrared photometry with a significantly large sample size
of the WISE-SDSS-GALEX galaxies (>50,000 sources). Finally, we study how the
levels of extra attenuation toward nebular regions change across the SFR-Mstar
plane. We find that, even at a fixed stellar mass, galaxies located below the
main sequence tend to have higher levels of extra attenuation toward nebular
regions, suggesting the change in dust geometry within the galaxies across the
star-forming main sequence during the course of star formation quenching
process.
