A Large Catalog of Accurate Distances to Local Molecular Clouds: The Gaia DR2 Edition

By C. Zucker, Joshua S. Speagle, Edward F. Schlafly, Gregory M. Green, Douglas P. Finkbeiner, A. Goodman, Joao F. Alves. Astrophysical Journal, 2019

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We present a uniform catalog of accurate distances to local molecular clouds informed by the Gaia DR2 data release. Our methodology builds on that of Schlafly et al. First, we infer the distance and extinction to stars along sightlines toward the clouds using optical and near-infrared photometry. When available, we incorporate knowledge of the stellar distances obtained from Gaia DR2 parallax measurements. We model these per-star distance–extinction estimates as being caused by a dust screen with a 2D morphology derived from Planck at an unknown distance, which we then fit for using a nested sampling algorithm. We provide updated distances to the Schlafly et al. sightlines toward the Dame et al. and Magnani et al. clouds, finding good agreement with the earlier work. For a subset of 27 clouds, we construct interactive pixelated distance maps to further study detailed cloud structure, and find several clouds which display clear distance gradients and/or are comprised of multiple components. We use these maps to determine robust average distances to these clouds. The characteristic combined uncertainty on our distances is ≈5%–6%, though this can be higher for clouds at greater distances, due to the limitations of our single-cloud model.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0f6d01043129c8c7d4800a7e4e4a8bdae9ccd89f

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Citations in the corpus

Photo-astrometric distances, extinctions, and astrophysical parameters for Gaia DR2 stars brighter than G = 18 (2019, methodology): “…our results can thus be used to construct 3D extinction maps (e.g. Schlafly & Finkbeiner 2011; Green et al. 2015) and infer the three-dimensional dust distribution in the extended solar vicinity (e.g. Capitanio et al. 2017; Rezaei Kh. et al. 2018; Lallement et al. 2019; Zucker et al. 2019).”
A compendium of distances to molecular clouds in the Star Formation Handbook (2020, methodology): “(5)Whether the sightline was taken from Zucker et al. (2019) (Y) or is novel to this work (N).”