Mapping the interstellar dust with near-infrared observations: An optimized multi-band technique

By Marco Lombardi, Joao F. Alves. 2001

244 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We generalize Lada et al. (1994) Nice technique to map dust column density through a molecular cloud to an optimized multi-band technique that can be applied to any multi-band survey of molecular clouds. We present a first application to a ~ 625 deg2 subset of the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) data and show that when compared to Nice, the optimized Nicer (i) achieves the same extinction peak values, (ii) improves the noise variance of the map by a factor of 2 and (iii) is able to reach 3σ dust extinction measurements as low as A V ≃ 0.5 magnitudes, better than or equivalent to classical optical star count techniques and below the threshold column density for the formation of CO.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/be63d35a8cfbd86f73ffc3b8211fa3a3e7caa8db

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. N. Evans II
2. Mark R. Krumholz
3. P. Myers
4. Ralf Klessen
5. Christoph Federrath
6. M. Heyer
7. S. Glover
8. L. Allen

In Instrumentation

1. N. Evans II
2. P. Myers
3. M. Tafalla
4. Jens Kauffmann
5. P. Caselli
6. Mark R. Krumholz
7. J. Pineda
8. C. Lada

Citations in the corpus

• THE RELATION BETWEEN GAS AND DUST IN THE TAURUS MOLECULAR CLOUD (2010, methodology): “We would like to thank Douglas Whittet for the idea to add the column density of CO–ices to the gas–phase CO column densities, Jonathan Foster for providing sample extinction maps that were used to test the implementation of the NICER algorithm used here, John Black, Edwine van Dishoeck, and Ruud Vi”
• A LARGE CATALOG OF ACCURATE DISTANCES TO MOLECULAR CLOUDS FROM PS1 PHOTOMETRY (2014, methodology): “A systematic study (Lombardi & Alves 2001; Lombardi et al. 2011; Lada et al. 2009) using data from Two Micron Sky Survey (2MASS) has led to precise distance estimates for a number of clouds by counting the number of unextinguished foreground stars toward large molecular clouds and by comparing to…”
• Herschel-Planck dust optical-depth and column-density maps - I. Method description and results for Orion (2014, unknown): “Note, however, that a technique such as Nicer, which is optimized but does not take into account the effect of foreground stars or small-scale inhomogeneities, is clearly biased and cannot be used to probe high-column density regions.”
• The Large- and Small-Scale Structures of Dust in the Star-forming Perseus Molecular Cloud (2006, methodology): “The extinction data we present here were derived from the Two Micron All Sky Sur- vey (2MASS) images of Perseus by Alves & Lombardi (2006) (see also Ridge et al. 2006b) using the NICER technique (Lombardi & Alves 2001) as a part of the COMPLETE Survey (Goodman 2004).”
• Structural Analysis of Molecular Clouds: Dendrograms (2008, methodology): “We use the extinction map for the L1448 region derived from deepJHK Calar Alto observations of the L1448 region using the Near Infrared Color Excess Revisited (NICER Lombardi & Alves 2001) technique (Foster & Goodman 2006).”
• Cold Dark Clouds: The Initial Conditions for Star Formation (2007, methodology): “Future use of this technique with 8m class telescopes is expected to provide accurate extinction maps with two orders of magnitude dynamical range and a resolution better than 10′′ (Lombardi & Alves 2001).”
• Infrared Dark Clouds: Precursors to Star Clusters (2004, background): “Many studies of Bok globules have used optical and IR star counts to trace their visual extinctions and, hence, have measured their column densities , masses, and internal structure (e.g. Lada et al. 1994; Alves et al. 2001; Lombardi & Alves 2001).”
• 2MASS wide field extinction maps. I. The Pipe nebula (2006, methodology): “In part to make use of the wealth of NIR data provided by the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS; Kleinmann et al. 1994) the Nice method was further developed into an optimized multi-band technique dubbed Near-Infrared Color Excess Revisited (Nicer, Lombardi & Alves 2001, hereafter Paper I).”
• ON THE STAR FORMATION RATES IN MOLECULAR CLOUDS (2010, methodology): “The maps were primarily made using the NICER method (Lombardi & Alves 2001), an optimized technique for converting the individual multi-band photometric measurements of millions of stars into well ordered, fully sampled, extinction maps of large areas of the sky at modest angular resolutions.”
• The mass function of dense molecular cores and the origin of the IMF (2006, methodology): “LAL06 applied a 3-band (1.25 µm, 1.65 µm, 2.2 µm) optimized version of this method, the Nicer method (Lombardi & Alves 2001), to about 4 million stars background to the Pipe nebula complex to construct a 6◦ × 8◦ dust column density map of this complex, presented in Figure 1.”
• DIRECT OBSERVATION OF A SHARP TRANSITION TO COHERENCE IN DENSE CORES (2010, background): “Extinction maps trace the total column density along the line of sight, and they are useful to study the large scale structure in MCs (e.g., Lada et al. 1994; Alves et al. 1998; Lombardi & Alves 2001; Pineda et al. 2008; Goodman et al. 2009) and to identify dense cores (e.g., Alves et al. 2007).”
• Hipparcos distance estimates of the Ophiuchus and the Lupus cloud complexes (2008, methodology): “For the purpose, we used approximately 42 million stars from the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) point source catalog to construct a 1 672 square degrees Nicer (Lombardi & Alves 2001) extinction map of the Ophiuchus and Lupus dark nebulæ.”
• Probing the evolution of molecular cloud structure: From quiescence to birth (2009, methodology): “For the further description of the method itself, we refer to Lombardi & Alves (2001) and Lombardi (2009) (see also Lombardi 2005).”
• An Extinction Threshold for Protostellar Cores in Ophiuchus (2004, unknown): “The resolution of the extinction map depends on the densities of stars used to derive extinctions, but it should be only as low as ∼3′ at the highest extinctions (see Lombardi & Alves 2001).”
• The COMPLETE Survey of Star-Forming Regions: Phase I Data (2006, methodology): “We used the NICER (Near-Infrared Color Excess Revisited) algorithm (Lombardi & Alves 2001, 2006), which combines observations from all three near-infrared bands to produce maps with lower noise than is possible from using just two bands.”
• Spitzer Observations of NGC 1333: A Study of Structure and Evolution in a Nearby Embedded Cluster (2007, methodology): “The method used is identical to that presented in Section 3.1 of Gutermuth et al. (2005), based on elements of both the NICE (Lada et al. 1994) and NICER (Lombardi & Alves 2001) algorithms.”
• LIFTING THE DUSTY VEIL WITH NEAR- AND MID-INFRARED PHOTOMETRY. I. DESCRIPTION AND APPLICATIONS OF THE RAYLEIGH–JEANS COLOR EXCESS METHOD (2011, methodology): “Lombardi & Alves (2001) set out to generalize the Lada et al. (1994) NICE method to take advantage of multiband data (specifically, JHKs data from 2MASS) and introduced the NICER (Near-Infrared Color Excess – Revisited) technique.”
• The Initial Configuration of Young Stellar Clusters: A K-Band Number Counts Analysis of the Surface Density of Stars (2004, methodology): “Instead, we derive the AK maps for this work using the H − K colors of all stars detected in both bandpasses (Lada et al. 1994; Lombardi & Alves 2001).”