A LARGE CATALOG OF ACCURATE DISTANCES TO MOLECULAR CLOUDS FROM PS1 PHOTOMETRY

By Edward F. Schlafly, Gregory M. Green, Douglas P. Finkbeiner, Hans-Walter Rix, Eric F. Bell, W. Burgett, K. Chambers, P. Draper, K. Hodapp, N. Kaiser and 5 more. 2014

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Distance measurements to molecular clouds are important but are often made separately for each cloud of interest, employing very different data and techniques. We present a large, homogeneous catalog of distances to molecular clouds, most of which are of unprecedented accuracy. We determine distances using optical photometry of stars along lines of sight toward these clouds, obtained from PanSTARRS-1. We simultaneously infer the reddenings and distances to these stars, tracking the full probability distribution function using a technique presented in Green et al. We fit these star-by-star measurements using a simple dust screen model to find the distance to each cloud. We thus estimate the distances to almost all of the clouds in the Magnani et al. catalog, as well as many other well-studied clouds, including Orion, Perseus, Taurus, Cepheus, Polaris, California, and Monoceros R2, avoiding only the inner Galaxy. Typical statistical uncertainties in the distances are 5%, though the systematic uncertainty stemming from the quality of our stellar models is about 10%. The resulting catalog is the largest catalog of accurate, directly measured distances to molecular clouds. Our distance estimates are generally consistent with available distance estimates from the literature, though in some cases the literature estimates are off by a factor of more than two.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b473baadcf698bb3c0c822d8800b70c490d63c24

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Citations in the corpus

A THREE-DIMENSIONAL MAP OF MILKY WAY DUST (2015, methodology): “Using a modified version of the method used in this paper along individual sightlines, Schlafly et al. (2014b) places the two components of the Cepheus flare at distances of 360±35 pc and 900±90 pc.”
THE HAWAII INFRARED PARALLAX PROGRAM. II. YOUNG ULTRACOOL FIELD DWARFS (2016, background): “…distance of 87.7+9.4−11.8 pc, with a kinematics-only BANYAN II analysis still indicating >99.9% Y.FLD. Cruz et al. (2003) noted that the object lies in the direction of the high-galactic latitude MBM20 (LDN 1642) cloud, which has an estimated distance of 124 ± 19 pc (Schlafly et al. 2014).”
THE GOULD’S BELT DISTANCES SURVEY (GOBELINS). II. DISTANCES AND STRUCTURE TOWARD THE ORION MOLECULAR CLOUDS (2016, background): “Schlafly et al. (2014) provided distance estimates of 20 distinct regions through extinction from PanSTARRS photometry, although many of them are highly uncertain.”
Three-dimensional mapping of the local interstellar medium with composite data (2017, methodology): “11, we superimposed the opacity distribution resulting from our D inversion and the position of the cloud cores identified by Schlafly et al. (2014) with associated error bars on their positions.”
BANYAN. VII. A NEW POPULATION OF YOUNG SUBSTELLAR CANDIDATE MEMBERS OF NEARBY MOVING GROUPS FROM THE BASS SURVEY (2015, background): “This object has a low galactic latitude (b = −18.57°) and is located in the vicinity of the OMC (Gatley et al. 1974; Schlafly et al. 2014).”
A compendium of distances to molecular clouds in the Star Formation Handbook (2020, unknown): “…in a more modern sense, our methodology is similar to that presented by Neckel & Klare (1980), which has a rich history in the literature (see e.g. Schlafly et al. 2014; Sale & Magorrian 2018; Lallement et al. 2019; Green et al. 2019; Marshall et al. 2006; Rezaei Kh. et al. 2018; Yan et al. 2019).”