Three-dimensional mapping of the local interstellar medium with composite data

By L. Capitanio, R. Lallement, Jean-Luc Vergely, M. Elyajouri, A. Monreal-Ibero. 2017

175 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Three-dimensional maps of the Galactic interstellar medium are general astrophysical tools. Reddening maps may be based on the inversion of color excess measurements for individual target stars or on statistical methods using stellar surveys. Three-dimensional maps based on diffuse interstellar bands (DIBs) have also been produced. All methods benefit from the advent of massive surveys and from Gaia data. We first updated our previous local dust maps based on a regularized Bayesian inversion of individual color excess data by replacing Hipparcos or photometric distances with Gaia Data Release 1 values when available. Secondly, we complemented this database with a series of ~5,000 color excess values estimated from the strength of the lambda 15273 DIB toward stars from SDSS/APOGEE, possessing a Gaia parallax. Third, we computed a low-resolution map based on a grid of Pan-STARRS reddening measurements by means of a new hierarchical technique and used this map as the prior distribution during the inversion of the two other datasets. Here we present a first attempt to combine different datasets and methods to improve the local maps. The use of Gaia parallaxes introduces significant changes in some areas and globally increases the compactness of the structures. Additional DIB-based data make it possible to assign distances to clouds located behind closer opaque structures and do not introduce contradictory information for the close structures. A more realistic prior distribution instead of a plane-parallel homogeneous distribution helps better define the structures. We validated the results through comparisons with other maps and with soft X-ray data. Our study demonstrates that the combination of various tracers is a potential tool for more accurate maps. An online tool makes it possible to retrieve maps and reddening estimations (this http URL).

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/926c24085ea68e7b168330bfa0d05fda267fc46b

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Instrumentation

Citations in the corpus

Gaia-2MASS 3D maps of Galactic interstellar dust within 3 kpc (2019, methodology): “The present hierarchical inversion has suppressed or at least strongly attenuated what was the main limitation of our full 3D mapping technique (used recently by Capitanio et al. (2017); Lallement et al. (2018)), namely the use of a unique correlation length.”
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).”
Stellar and substellar companions of nearby stars from Gaia DR2 (2018, methodology): “For the more distant objects in our extended catalog, we adopted the color excess E(B−V) predicted by the Stilism2 three-dimensional (3D) model of the local interstellar medium (Lallement et al. 2014; Capitanio et al. 2017).”