Vindicating single-T modified blackbody fits to Herschel SEDs (Research
  Note)
  I show here that the bulk of the dust mass in a galaxy can be equivalently
estimated from: i) the full spectral energy distribution of dust emission,
using the approach of Draine & Lee (2007) that includes a distribution of dust
grains and a range of interstellar radiation field intensities; ii) the
emission in the wavelength range 100um <= lambda <= 500um (covered by the
Herschel Space Observatory), by fitting to the data a simpler single
temperature modified blackbody. Recent claims on the contrary (Dale et al.
2012) should be interpreted as a caveat to use in the simpler fits an
absorption cross section which is consistent both in the normalization and in
the spectral index beta with that of the full dust model. I also show that the
dust mass does not depend significantly on the choice of beta, if both the dust
mass and the absorption cross section are derived with the same assumption on
beta.
