An Analysis of the Shapes of Interstellar Extinction Curves. V. The IR-through-UV Curve Morphology

By E. Fitzpatrick, D. Massa. 2007

567 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the IR-through-UV wavelength dependence of 328 Galactic interstellar extinction curves affecting normal, near-main-sequence B and late O stars. We derive the curves using a new technique that employs stellar atmosphere models in lieu of unreddened "standard" stars. Under ideal conditions, this technique is capable of virtually eliminating spectral mismatch errors in the curves. In general, it lends itself to a quantitative assessment of the errors and enables a rigorous testing of the significance of relationships between various curve parameters, regardless of whether their uncertainties are correlated. Analysis of the curves gives the following results: 1. In accord with our previous findings, the central position of the 2175 Å extinction bump is mildly variable, its width is highly variable, and the two variations are unrelated. 2. Strong correlations are found among some extinction properties within the UV region, and within the IR region. 3. With the exception of a few curves with extreme (i.e., large) values of R(V), the UV and IR portions of Galactic extinction curves are not correlated with each other. 4. The large sight line-to-sight line variation seen in our sample implies that any average Galactic extinction curve will always reflect the biases of its parent sample. The use of an average curve to deredden a spectral energy distribution (SED) will result in significant errors, and a realistic error budget for the dereddened SED must include the observed variance of Galactic curves. While the observed large sight line-to-sight line variations, and the lack of correlation among the various features of the curves, make it difficult to meaningfully characterize average extinction properties, they demonstrate that extinction curves respond sensitively to local conditions. Thus, each curve contains potentially unique information about the grains along its sight line.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a9668c950699b90996f85f26a83ee8086135fffb

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. C. Conroy
2. D. Schneider
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6. L. Hernquist
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Citations in the corpus

• Analysis of galaxy spectral energy distributions from far-UV to far-IR with CIGALE: studying a SINGS test sample (2009, background): “…by adding a UV bump which is modelled by a Lorentzianlike “Drude” profile Dλ0, γ,Ebump(λ) = Ebumpλ2γ2 (λ2 − λ02)2 + λ2γ2 , (3) where λ0, γ, and Ebump are the central wavelength, width (≈ FWHM), and amplitude (or maximum height), respectively (Fitzpatrick & Massa 1990, 2007; Noll et al. 2009).”
• The SDSS–2MASS–WISE 10-dimensional stellar colour locus (2014, background): “Flaherty et al. (2007) and Fitzpatrick & Massa (2007) have shown that mid-IR extinction can vary significantly between different lines of sight.”
• The global dust SED: tracing the nature and evolution of dust with DustEM (2010, background): “The question of the origin of this feature is however still open because graphite cannot explain the band profile variability observed in the ISM (Fitzpatrick & Massa 2007; Draine 2003a).”
• Gaia-2MASS 3D maps of Galactic interstellar dust within 3 kpc (2019, methodology): “The extinction coefficients are derived using the Fitzpatrick & Massa (2007) extinction law and the Kurucz Spectral Energy Distributions (Castelli & Kurucz 2003), as described in Danielski et al. (2018).”
• GOODS-Herschel: dust attenuation properties of UV selected high redshift galaxies (2012, background): “The attenuation law for local starbursts, based on spectroscopic data, does not exhibit a bump at 2175 Å such as that observed in the extinction curves of the Milky Way (MW) or the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) (Fitzpatrick & Massa, 2007; Gordon et al., 2003).”
• ON THE SOURCE OF THE DUST EXTINCTION IN TYPE Ia SUPERNOVAE AND THE DISCOVERY OF ANOMALOUSLY STRONG Na i ABSORPTION (2013, methodology): “In the Milky Way, the distribution of RV values is strongly peaked at ∼3 (e.g., see Fitzpatrick & Massa 2007), whereas the situation is not so clear for SNe Ia in other galaxies.”
• Planck2018 results (2018, unknown): “1 (Fitzpatrick & Massa 2007), and τ V = A V / 1 .”
• Painting a portrait of the Galactic disc with its stellar clusters (2020, background): “However, Jordi et al. (2010) remark that varying the extinction law within the range reported by Fitzpatrick & Massa (2007) has a negligible effect on the Gaia photometry.”
• THE CARNEGIE SUPERNOVA PROJECT: ANALYSIS OF THE FIRST SAMPLE OF LOW-REDSHIFT TYPE-Ia SUPERNOVAE (2009, methodology): “Extinction in the Galaxy is well approximated by the CCM+O law with an average value of RV ≈ 3 (e.g., Fitzpatrick & Massa 2007).”
• INTRINSIC COLORS, TEMPERATURES, AND BOLOMETRIC CORRECTIONS OF PRE-MAIN-SEQUENCE STARS (2013, unknown): “…Blackwell & Lynas-Gray (1998); Gray et al. (2001a, 2003); Taylor (2005); Valenti & Fischer (2005); Paunzen et al. (2006); Gerbaldi et al. (2007); Fitzpatrick & Massa (2007); Prugniel et al. (2007); Zorec et al. (2009); Soubiran et al. (2010); Casagrande et al. (2011), and the authors calculated…”
• FIRST-YEAR SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY-II SUPERNOVA RESULTS: HUBBLE DIAGRAM AND COSMOLOGICAL PARAMETERS (2009, methodology): “Measurements of dust properties in the Milky Way have favored an average value of RV ∼ 3.1 (Fitzpatrick & Massa 2007) along sight lines with moderate to substantial extinction, and this has been used as a canonical value in the literature.”
• The VST Photometric Hα Survey of the Southern Galactic Plane and Bulge (VPHAS (2014, methodology): “Both main-sequence and giant-star colours have been calculated for a range of reddenings and optical–IR extinction laws as formulated by Fitzpatrick & Massa (2007).”
• The dependence of Type Ia Supernovae luminosities on their host galaxies (2010, background): “SN Ia host galaxies are likely to display a range in effective RV – the Galactic average is 2.99±0.27 (e.g. Fitzpatrick & Massa 2007), and there is no reason to expect the range present in SN Ia hosts to be smaller.”
• The evolution of amorphous hydrocarbons in the ISM: dust modelling from a new vantage point (2013, methodology): “4. log-n indicates a logarithmic normal distribution, dn/da ∝ exp(−log[a/a0]2)/σ. variations predicted by the model are in very good agreement with the observed FUV extinction dispersion seen in the diffuse ISM (Fitzpatrick 2004; Fitzpatrick & Massa 2007).”
• Gaia broad band photometry (2010, background): “In Fitzpatrick & Massa (2007), which contains the most updated discussion on the absorption law,extinction curves withRV values in the range 2.4–3.6 are considered for a sample 243 stars in sight lines with diffuse interstellar 8 Table 12 is only available in electronic form.”
• THE INFRARED TELESCOPE FACILITY (IRTF) SPECTRAL LIBRARY: COOL STARS (2009, methodology): “We adopted the NIR law given by (Fitzpatrick & Massa 2007) with RV =3.0.”