LIFTING THE DUSTY VEIL WITH NEAR- AND MID-INFRARED PHOTOMETRY. I. DESCRIPTION AND APPLICATIONS OF THE RAYLEIGH–JEANS COLOR EXCESS METHOD

By S. Majewski, G. Zasowski, D. Nidever. 2011

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The Milky Way (MW) remains a primary laboratory for understanding the structure and evolution of spiral galaxies, but typically we are denied clear views of MW stellar populations at low Galactic latitudes because of extinction by interstellar dust. However, the combination of Two Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS) near-infrared (NIR) and Spitzer-IRAC mid-infrared (MIR) photometry enables a powerful method for determining the line-of-sight reddening to any star: the sampled wavelengths lie in the Rayleigh–Jeans part of the spectral energy distribution of most stars, where, to first order, all stars have essentially the same intrinsic color. Thus, changes in stellar NIR–MIR colors due to interstellar reddening are readily apparent, and (under an assumed extinction law) the observed colors and magnitudes of stars can be easily and accurately restored to their intrinsic values, greatly increasing their usefulness for Galactic structure studies. In this paper, we explore this “Rayleigh–Jeans Color Excess” (RJCE) method and demonstrate that use of even a simple variant of the RJCE method based on a single reference color, (H −[4.5μ]), can rather accurately remove dust effects from previously uninterpretable 2MASS color–magnitude diagrams of stars in fields along the heavily reddened Galactic midplane, with results far superior to those derived from application of other dereddening methods. We also show that “total” Galactic midplane extinction looks rather different from that predicted using 100μ emission maps from the IRAS/ISSA and COBE/DIRBE instruments as presented by Schlegel et al. Instead, the Galactic midplane extinction strongly resembles the distribution of 13CO (J = 1→0) emission. Future papers will focus on refining the RJCE method and applying the technique to understand better not only dust and its distribution but also the distribution of stars intermixed with the dust in the low-latitude Galaxy.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8a59a8965817058f9cebdbf3c4b25a6cbea2b0be

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Citations in the corpus

THE TENTH DATA RELEASE OF THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY: FIRST SPECTROSCOPIC DATA FROM THE SDSS-III APACHE POINT OBSERVATORY GALACTIC EVOLUTION EXPERIMENT (2013, methodology): “…et al. 2003; Churchwell et al. 2009) and the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE; Wright et al. 2010) λ = 4.5 μm data following the Rayleigh–Jeans Color Excess Method described in Majewski et al. (2011) and Zasowski et al. (2013) using the color extinction curve from Indebetouw et al. (2005).”
THE APOGEE RED-CLUMP CATALOG: PRECISE DISTANCES, VELOCITIES, AND HIGH-RESOLUTION ELEMENTAL ABUNDANCES OVER A LARGE AREA OF THE MILKY WAY'S DISK (2014, methodology): “The photometry for all APOGEE targets is corrected for extinction with the Rayleigh Jeans Color Excess method (RJCE; Majewski et al. 2011).”
CHEMICAL CARTOGRAPHY WITH APOGEE: METALLICITY DISTRIBUTION FUNCTIONS AND THE CHEMICAL STRUCTURE OF THE MILKY WAY DISK (2015, methodology): “Extinction and dereddening for each individual star are determined using the Rayleigh–Jeans Color Excess method (RJCE;Majewski et al. 2011), which uses Two Micron All Sky Surveyphotometry (Skrutskie et al. 2006) in conjunction with near-IR photometry from the Spitzer/IRAC (Fazio & Team 2004)…”
OBSERVING THE NEXT GALACTIC SUPERNOVA (2013, methodology): “Since the SFD98 dust maps may be completely problematic in the areas of high extinction found near the Galactic midplane (e.g., Majewski et al. 2011), we also consider a model employing the Rayleigh-Jeans Color Excess (RJCE) extinction map of the Galactic midplane presented by Nidever et al. (2012)…”
THE MILKY WAY'S CIRCULAR-VELOCITY CURVE BETWEEN 4 AND 14 kpc FROM APOGEE DATA (2012, methodology): “Photometry for all targets is extinction-corrected using the Rayleigh Jeans Color Excess method (RJCE; Majewski et al. 2011), which provides extinction values AK with typical random uncertainties .”
The structure of the Milky Way's bar outside the bulge (2015, methodology): “In addition H−Ks is more constant across stellar types than J−Ks improving the extinction correction (Majewski et al. 2011).”
TRACING CHEMICAL EVOLUTION OVER THE EXTENT OF THE MILKY WAY'S DISK WITH APOGEE RED CLUMP STARS (2014, methodology): “The RC Ks-band magnitudes are extinctioncorrected using 2MASS+Spitzer/WISE photometry and the RJCE method (Majewski et al. 2011).”
StarHorse : a Bayesian tool for determining stellar masses, ages, distances, and extinctions for field stars (2017, methodology): “(iv) AV prior As priors for the V-band extinction we used the APOGEE targeting extinction values (Zasowski et al. 2013), derived by the RJCE method (Majewski et al. 2011), by setting AV,prior = A(Ks)Targ/0.12.”
THE STELLAR POPULATION STRUCTURE OF THE GALACTIC DISK (2015, methodology): “…to three magnitude bins in H (not corrected for extinction), with reddening corrections determined using the Rayleigh Jeans Color Excess method (RJCE; Majewski et al. 2011) applied to 2MASS and mid-IR data from SpitzerIRAC GLIMPSE-I, -II, and -3D (Churchwell et al. 2009) when available and from…”
Surface brightness profile of the Milky Way’s nuclear star cluster (2014, result): “This value agrees closely with the colours computed by Majewski et al. (2011) for late-type stars (see their Fig.”
The GALAH Survey: Second Data Release (2018, methodology): “The values for AK are estimated from the RJCE method (Majewski et al. 2011).”
Dynamical modelling of the galactic bulge and bar: the Milky Way's pattern speed, stellar and dark matter mass distribution (2016, methodology): “Extinction is evaluated on a star-by-star basis using the Rayleigh-Jeans Color Excess method (Majewski et al. 2011; W15) given by: AKs = AKs E(J−Ks) [(J−Ks)− (J−Ks)RCG)] (7) where (J−Ks)RCG is the colors of RCGs and AKsE(J−Ks) is a constant that depends on the extinction law.”
Chemical tagging with APOGEE: Discovery of a large population of N-rich stars in the inner Galaxy (2016, methodology): “…the N-rich and N-normal samples in the dereddened 2MASS (Skrutskie et al. 2006) CMD. Dereddening was performed using AK from DR12 (adopting the A K TARG parameter), which was inferred through the RJCE method (Majewski et al. 2011), and adopting the extinction law from Indebetouw et al. (2005).”
Target Selection for the SDSS-IV APOGEE-2 Survey (2017, methodology): “After applying data quality limits to ensure reliable photometry7 (Table 2), we use the RJCE method to calculate dereddened (J −Ks)0 colors (Majewski et al. 2011).”
THE APOKASC CATALOG: AN ASTEROSEISMIC AND SPECTROSCOPIC JOINT SURVEY OF TARGETS IN THE KEPLER FIELDS (2014, methodology): “Zasowski et al. (2013) used 2MASS, IRAC, and WISE data to infer extinctions when developing the APOGEE target list, using the RJCE method (Majewski et al. 2011); work on a related approach for Kepler targets is in progress.”
Chemodynamics of the Milky Way - I. The first year of APOGEE data (2013, methodology): “…al. 2005) contained in the APOGEE targeting (requiring only that the uncertainties of the corresponding [4.5µ] magnitude be ≤ 0.1 mag), as well as the actual extinction values A(Ks) calculated with the RJCE method (Majewski et al. 2011; Nidever et al. 2012a), as described in Zasowski et al. (2013).”
The Milky Way’s stellar disk (2013, methodology): “Practical ways to constrain the extinction to any given star, given multiband photometry or spectra, have recently been worked out by, e.g., Bailer-Jones (2011) and Majewski et al. (2011) for different regimes of Av.”