Galaxy and Mass Assembly (GAMA): mid-infrared properties and empirical relations from WISE

The Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey furnishes a deep redshift catalog that, when combined with the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), allows us to explore for the first time the mid-infrared properties of >110,000 galaxies over 120 deg2 to z 0.5. In this paper we detail the procedure for producing the matched GAMA-WISE catalog for the G12 and G15 fields, in particular characterizing and measuring resolved sources; the complete catalogs for all three GAMA equatorial fields will be made available through the GAMA public releases. The wealth of multiwavelength photometry and optical spectroscopy allows us to explore empirical relations between optically determined stellar mass (derived from synthetic stellar population models) and 3.4µm and 4.6µm WISE measurements. Similarly dust-corrected Ha-derived star formation rates can be compared to 12µm and 22µm luminosities to quantify correlations that can be applied to large samples to z < 0.5. To illustrate the applications of these relations, we use the 12µm star formation prescription to investigate the behavior of specific star formation within the GAMA-WISE sample and underscore the ability of WISE to detect star-forming systems at z ~ 0.5. Within galaxy groups (determined by a sophisticated friends-of-friends scheme), results suggest that galaxies with a neighbor within 100 h-1 kpc have, on average, lower specific star formation rates than typical GAMA galaxies with the same stellar mass.